


Whumptober 2019

by SadinaSaphrite



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Violence, Bombing, Child Death, Dismemberment, Fluff, Gen, Gore, Gun Violence, Hostage Situations, Major Character Injury, Near Death Experiences, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Suicidal Thoughts, Whump, Whumptober, drug mention, robot self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-11-08 21:09:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 23,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20842043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SadinaSaphrite/pseuds/SadinaSaphrite
Summary: 31 Days, 31 Prompts, 31 Overwatch Heroes. A series of short scenes and drabbles making each of the playable Overwatch Heroes suffer. No Character Death, though there may be cliffhangers where the scene ends with an injured character passing out.





	1. Shaky Hands - Winston

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Whumptober 2019, where everyone gets to suffer in the best possible ways! Most of these will be short scenes or drabbles of only a few hundred words. If anyone wants a scene to become a full story, leave a request in the comments! If anyone wants to take a drabble and run with it to make your own story, go for it! Just shoot me a link so I can read it, too!

The crackle of the soldering gun drowned under the chaos of the shattered Numbani street. Police swarmed the area, roping off the battleground and herding away the alarmed public and eager journalists. Someone had already carted away Doomfist’s unconscious body and Genji had been escorted to a hospital. Reporters were trying to push past the police, eager to bombard him with questions. Winston ignored all of it, pouring over the broken circuitry and wiring before him, laid out on the upended car he'd made into a makeshift worktable.

Gone. Lena was gone. Winston had watched as Doomfist shattered Lena’s chrono accelerator, and he had done _nothing._ Sure, he had defeated Doomfist and put a stop to Talon, but that didn’t change the fact that Lena was scattered to the chronological winds. 

“Winston, we’ve got the secondary chrono accelerator from the Geneva lab on a drone and flying directly to your location. ETA three hours.”

Too long.

“Thank you, Captain,” Winston said anyway. “I will continue to try and repair the damaged unit.”

Not enough time. With every second, Lena’s odds of returning to a stable timeline diminished. If he didn’t fix the harness, if he couldn’t get close enough to Lena to draw her back into the chronological present then Lena would be lost. No more movie nights, no more chattering away in the lab, no more Christmas sweaters, no more deep discussions about life and happiness.

The tip of the soldering gun trembled. Winston hastily pulled the tool away before it could damage the delicate circuitry and looked down at himself. His hands shook. No! No, he needed to do this! If he couldn’t…if he failed…

Tears beaded in Winston’s eyes and his hands trembled hard enough that he needed to set the soldering gun down. What if he failed? What if he never saw his best friend again? What if…

No. No, he couldn’t have that attitude. He wouldn’t fail. 

Winston wiped the tears away and fixed his glasses. He flexed his thick fingers and clenched them into fists, then let out a long breath. He could do this.

Winston picked up the soldering gun and got back to work.


	2. Explosion - Roadhog

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this Chapter: Heavily Implied Child Death

Mako drove his ramshackle chopper through the night, navigating the poorly-maintained dirt road with ease, the bike’s engine roaring in his ears. The Australian Liberation Front meeting had been very productive; they’d planned three omnic community bombings, and Kev was on track to getting through the Omnium’s security systems. If things went as planned, they could have the outback free of omnic interlopers before Kaia started school in two years. She’d be able to grow up in a land free from these damn robots. Learn to be a solar farmer like her papa. 

Mako slowed to a stop as he reached the quaint farmhouse. He only had a few hours to sleep before dawn, when he’d have to get up and check on the solar panels. They were supposed to be self-regulating, following the path of the sun across the sky like a sunflower, but the extreme temperatures in the outback and constant dust and dirt mucked things up. He’s just check on Kaia and–

The explosion threw Mako backward, clean through his white picket fence. His head cracked against a rock and he knew no more.

* * *

The sun had cleared the horizon by the time Mako awoke. He groaned and rolled over, feeling like he’d been hit by a truck. His head ached with a splitting headache, and he could feel dried blood crusted in his hair. What in the hell was…

He looked up to see the burned-out wreckage of his home, little more than scorched cinderblock and charred beams.

_Kaia._

Mako surged to his feet and surged toward the house, screaming his daughter’s name.

When he finally left the farm two days later, all he took with him was his chopper, the hatred in his heart, and a charred plushie pink pig. 

He wouldn’t rest until every omnic in Australia was scrap.


	3. Delirium - Moira

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tags for This Chapter: Drug Mention, Self Experimentation. It's Moira being Moira, so a Disaster.

This was it. After years of testing, years of research and testing, Moira was finally ready. She’d already spent the last four months infusing herself with the appropriate genetic catalysts that would alter her DNA and now she held in her hand the activating solution. Amazing. Just an innocuous syringe of 0.62 milliliters of clear solution would mean the difference between human and something more. Something _better_. 

The test on Reyes had been most insightful. She’d learned from her mistakes on him. She wouldn’t have the same degenerative condition he had, forever falling apart and constantly warring with decaying nanites. She would be stable. 

She took a seat in her testing chair, and with all the ease of a practiced heroin addict, she rolled up her sleeve and injected the solution into her right median cephalic vein. For a moment, barring the cold sensation of the injection, nothing happened. That was to be expected. It would take a little time for the solution to activate the genetic catalysts and–

A wave of dizziness washed over Moira, and she clutched at the arms of the chair as the room lurched unpleasantly to the left. One breath, and her body burned like liquid fire flowed through her veins. With the next breath, her skin pricked with goosebumps as though she’d been frozen. She was numb and in agony all at once, her cells responding to the catalysts within her, changing the very code of her DNA. 

She tried to curl into a ball and fell to the floor, nails scraping against the linoleum. Where was she? Dublin? Oasis? Rome? Which laboratory was this? She staggered to her feet and reeled sideways, stumbling into a counter. The fluorescent lights buzzed like a thousand wasps in her ears and she clung to the counter top for support as her knees wobbled dangerously. What was happening to her? Had she been poisoned? Who would do this to her? It was her father, wasn’t it?! That horrid drunk of a man, trying to ruin her career! 

Moira looked around the lab and tried to make sense of the room spinning wildly out of control. There must be an antidote somewhere! She just needed the antidote! She let go of the counter and veered into a set of shelves. Vials! Vials of drugs and other liquids. Surely one of these would be the antidote! She grabbed bottles with violently shaking fingers, trying to read labels with eyes that shifted in and out of focus. 

She picked up a large brown vial only to have it pass clean through her hand and shatter to the floor. Her grip on the shelves failed as her other hand dissolved into smoke and she collapsed to the ground.

No! No, she was so close! Her research! Her ambitions! They were fading away like…like…

All at once, her mind cleared. The room stopped spinning and fell silent. Moira lay on her back, breathing hard and sprawled amid broken glass, but her body whole and intact. She lifted a hand over her eyes. It was solid.

Stable.

She concentrated, and willed the hand to fade. It vanished into smoke before her eyes, then solidified as directed by her thoughts. No pain. Not even discomfort. A perfect result.

Moira lay back and laughed.

Success.


	4. Human Shield - Orisa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this Chapter: Hostage, Robot Self Damage

The sound of gunfire was audible in the street, and it was all the summons Orisa needed. Abandoning her post directing traffic, she sprinted for the Numbani First Bank and charged through the door. She struck an intimidating pose Efi had been teaching her, rearing up on her back legs and kicking out with her fronts before landing heavily. It was important to make a good entrance, Efi had said.

Her optics took in the situation in less than a second. Northwest corner by the tellers, one assailant armed with a P-32 Laser Pistol. Nine civilians in the bank lobby, all on their knees with arms raised. Four bank tellers, three with hands in the air and standing against the back wall, one at the front and handing the assailant stacks of currency. Orisa rotated her right arm to reveal her fusion driver projectile cannon. She did not want to escalate the situation, but wanted her weapon available if she needed to disable the assailant quickly. 

“Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air,” Orisa demanded. “You are endangering these people and I will not allow it!”

For a moment, the assailant looked properly shocked and intimidated, and Orisa was quite proud of herself. But the bank robber’s surprise did not last long, and he seized the closest civilian on the ground and hauled her to her feet.

“You want danger?” he sneered and put the gun to the woman’s head. “You’re gonna let me out of here, or I’ll blow this chick’s brains out!”

Orisa hesitated. This situation was…unforeseen. The assailant was using the woman as a human shield, and Orisa’s fusion driver was not accurate enough to reliably disable him and guarantee the hostage’s safety.

“Please, sir. If you need financial assistance, Numbani offers many financial aid solutions for those in need and–”

“Shut up!”

Orisa fell silent.

“I’m gonna tell you what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna drop your big ass gun and step away, and I’m gonna leave with all this money, and nobody has to get hurt. Got it?”

Orisa’s eye emote modules flickered with uncertainty. 

“I cannot drop my fusion driver projectile cannon. It is grafted to my arm. Perhaps we can find a solution where–”

“No, shut up! Stop talking!” The man inched toward the door. His eyes darted all over the room and his hands trembled, not like a man in fear, but like a man in poor control of his own actions. Perhaps he was suffering from some kind of chemical stimulus. If he suffered from chemical dependency, that could explain why he did not qualify for many of Numbani’s financial aid programs, though there were many other programs to assist with rehabilitation. Unless he did not want rehabilitation. Ah. Of course. That is why he was in need of money, to purchase more of his addictive stimulus.

“Drop the gun, cow!”

Orisa’s eyes flickered again. “I told you, I am incapable of dropping my fusion driver.”

“Then…then…” The man looked around frantically. “Then shoot yourself!”

“What?” Orisa asked, taken aback.

“Yeah! Yeah, shoot yourself, and then you can’t stop me!”

Damaging herself would be…wrong. If Orisa were to become inoperable, then she would be unable to help the people of Numbani, and even worse, it would break Efi’s heart. Was her life worth more than the human hostage? The measure and weight of life was a concept Orisa was still trying to grasp, and she did not expect that she would need to navigate a very literal example so soon.

The assailant tightened his grip on both his hostage and the trigger.

“Do it!”

The hostage screamed in fear. Something about the sound, or perhaps the woman’s wide-eyed terror, or the tears running down her dark cheeks, sent a spark through Orisa’s circuitry. 

She could not fail this woman. She could not let her die. This innocent woman’s life was important, and at that moment, Orisa knew she would do anything to protect her. 

But how? She was nothing like the heroes she idolized. What would they do? She was not a sharpshooter like the legend Ana Amari. She was not fast like the famous Tracer. Bravery and strength like Reinhardt also would not help.

But maybe she could be clever. Unlike most omnics, her central processing unit was located in her chestplate, not her head. Her head mostly contained her optical and sensory processors, along with her voice modulator. If she aimed carefully, she could appear to incapacitate herself and fool the assailant. 

“As you wish.”

Orisa calculated the most efficient angle, then raised the fusion driver to the side of her head and fired. She slumped to the ground and let her arms fall limp. 

Alarms coursed through her circuitry, running malfunction assessments and alerting her to the system damage. Despite her careful aim, she had completely destroyed the right optic and severely damaged the left optic. Her right auditory unit was shattered, but the left unit would be functional once it finished recalibrating. Her voice modulator was also intact. There was a great deal of unexpected damage to secondary circuitry, she would be unable to calibrate her supercharger, for instance, but overall she considered the ruse successful. 

She watched the assailant through her one remaining visual optic. The image was grainy and blurry as she tried to focus through a broken lens. 

The assailant looked shaken, staring at Orisa’s still form in disbelief. How strange. If he didn’t expect his request to work, then why did he suggest it? Humans could be so bizarre sometimes. 

Finally, the assailant shoved his hostage away and grabbed more stacks of bills off the counter, shoving money in his pockets before sprinting for the door. Orisa carefully calculated his trajectory. 

3…2…1…Now!

She snapped her hand out and caught the thief by his wrist. A single twist of her arm forced him to drop the pistol harmlessly to the floor. 

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Orisa said cheerfully, and scooped him up off the ground, holding him in her iron tight grip until the authorities could arrive to arrest him.

She stayed to dutifully answer all questions the police asked her, though frequently needed the officers to repeat the question until her damaged audio processor could decipher what they were asking, and was finally let go to return home. 

“Excuse me?”

Orisa stopped and turned to examine the figure addressing her. Closer examination with her damaged optic revealed it to be the woman who had been held hostage.

“I just…I only wanted…um…”

“Do you require further assistance? I would be happy to–”

The woman ran forward and embraced Orisa, though she barely stood high enough to reach around Orisa’s thick midsection. A…hug? This behavior surprised her. No one but Efi had attempted to give her a hug.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “Thank you so much.”

“I…was only following my programming…” Orisa said hesitantly.

“No omnic who does what you just did is just ‘following their programming.’ That was clever and brave and terrifying, and I was so afraid that you’d really…that you’d…”

Orisa gently put a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“I will need repairs, but I am fine…thank you.” 

The woman let Orisa go and wiped at her eyes.

“You’re the greatest gift Numbani has ever received. Remember that. I’ll see you around!”

Orisa watched her leave with a strange warm sensation in her chest. Perhaps she was not so different from her heroes after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, these are supposed to be whump and angst, but there's an alarming amount of fluff in here instead. I'm gonna put fluff in the tags because APPARENTLY I can't help myself.


	5. Gunpoint - Ashe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this Chapter: Graphic Depictions of Violence

“Yee-haw! This here’s the best haul yet, Ashe! I knew stickin’ with you was a good idea!”

“Shut up and get to work, Travis.” 

“Yes, ma’am!” Travis smashed the glass on another display case with the butt of his revolver.

Ashe strolled behind him, brushing aside broken glass and loading jewelry into the duffel bag over her shoulder. She paused to admire a particularly nice piece, a white gold bracelet lined with alternating diamonds and rubies. It sparkled pleasantly against her skin and she put it around her wrist instead of dropping it into the bag with the rest of their spoils. 

“Hey, Ashe. This one ain’t breaking. Should I shoot it?”

“No, dumbass,” Ashe snapped. “You want to damage the merchandise? I’m stealin’ gold and silver, not lead.”

“Yeah, o’course. Can I borrow your shotgun, then? Get a bit more leverage?”

Ashe pulled the shotgun off her shoulder and checked it over to make sure it wasn’t one she cared about.

“You’re lucky Viper’s in the shop,” She said, unloading the shotgun and tossing it over. “I’d kill you before I let you scratch her up.”

“Heh, yeah. I bet you would,” Travis briefly examined the shotgun before he tossed the it aside. He smirked and leveled his revolver at Ashe’s head. “But how ‘bout you let me do the honors instead?”

Ashe froze and stared down the barrel of the gun pointed at her, a fistful of diamond rings in her hand.

“Travis, what the damn hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m takin’ what’s owed me,” Travis said, a wicked gleam in his eye. “This was my tip, my job, and that makes it my score. I’m taking my share. Which is all of it. And you know, I was gonna just leave it at that, but you’ve been such a goddamn _bitch_ to work with, that I think I’m gonna put a bullet through your head, just for the sheer joy of it.”

“_You_ joined _my_ gang, you piece of shit!” Ashe snarled. She inched her hand toward the duffel bag, where her handgun was hidden.

“And it’s been an absolute pleasure to let you boss me around, but I’ve had enough. Hey!” He fired a warning shot that took the hat off her head. “Hands where I can see ‘em, Ashe! Over your head! Now!”

“Travis, I swear to God, you are going to regret having crossed me.” 

Ashe glowered and reluctantly raised her hands, mind racing. Her only other piece was the Ruger in the bag, which might as well be a mile away if Travis was willing to blow her brains out if her hand dropped as so much below eye level. Bob was with McCree, securing their transportation out of town, and it would be a good ten minutes before the cops showed up. She could try to keep him stalled long enough for the police to arrive. They’d both be arrested for sure, but incarcerated was a hell of a lot better than dead.

The only problem was that ten minutes was a long-ass time.

“You really think it’s a good idea to kill off the one person who made this score possible? You think you could have done this job yourself?”

“No,” Travis said, leaning back lazily against the display case. His aim never wavered. “But this score is all I need. Gonna use this to pay off some debts I owe, and then it’s back to honest living. No more crimes. No witnesses.”

He extended his arm and closed one eye. Ashe’s heart raced.

“Bye, Ashe.”

A gunshot cracked through the store, louder than the Smith and Wesson pointed between her eyes, and Ashe flinched. Travis dropped to the floor like a stone, half of his head blown out, brain spattered across the display cabinet. 

“Huh. Guess his head wasn’t empty after all.” 

Ashe looked to her right, where Jesse McCree leaned against the doorframe, pretending to blow smoke off the barrel of that big Colt .45 he carried.

“McCree!” Ashe couldn’t hide the relief in her voice, though she hated it. Hated that McCree had to save her hide, had seen her vulnerable and off guard. “I had it under control!”

“O’course you did, Ashe,” McCree drawled, pushing off the doorframe to saunter toward her. “Just coming to support you, that’s all.” 

He looked down and nudged Travis’s corpse with a boot. 

“Never did like him, much. Bit of a weasel.”

“A weasel and a traitor,” Ashe growled. “Now help me loot this joint so we can get the hell out of here!”

“Yes ma’am,” McCree grinned.

Ashe stood over Travis’s cooling body, giving him one last look. She’d actually liked Travis. He was stupid, but charming and funny. Ashe had even started getting sweet on him. Well, lesson learned. Trust was a luxury she couldn’t afford in this business. She’d never let her guard down like that again, and she would never tolerate a traitor.

She reached down and pulled the revolver out of Travis’ limp hand.

Ever.


	6. Dragged Away - Tracer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter. A bit of a loose interpretation of the prompt, I was envisioning getting "dragged away" from reality and Lena's proper timeline. This was also supposed to be significantly shorter, but I somehow wrote at least 200 words just on how much Lena likes jet planes, so...here you go.

“This is Slipstream, ready and awaiting authorization to initiate!”

“Roger, Tracer. Standby for authorization.”

Nothing in the world was quite like flying a fighter jet, Lena thought. Commercial planes were slow, clunky, and far too soft. With long, flexible wings to buffer turbulence and agonizingly slow turns, big planes felt like flying a whale wrapped in ten feet of pillows. Helicopters were a little more fun, just on account of how different they were from a plane, but flying a chopper felt more like floating than actually flying.

But jets? Jets were fun. To strap herself into a cockpit that could explode on command, tear off the runway at 320kph before even getting airborne, then rip into the sky and feeling _free_, without even gravity to stop her was exhilarating. The speed alone was thrilling. With a casual push of the controls, she could break the sound barrier and go supersonic just for fun, and the g-force pushing her into her seat kept her aware of just how _fast_ she was flying at every second. 

Lena and the jet were like one being, and she could feel every jolt and pocket of turbulence as if she were feeling through the steel skin of the jet. She knew the controls so well that they were intuitive, and she could flip, dive, and spin through the air like she was controlling the plane with her thoughts.

Fighter jets were the bloody _best._

Technically the Slipstream wasn’t a fighter. No guns, no missiles, but that wasn’t a problem for Lena. The plane flew better than anything in the RAF, and she got to be a member of the best peacekeeping organization in the world!

“Ground control to Tracer, commence with Slipstream testing procedure.”

“Roger, Ground Control!” Lena grinned and lined the jet up with the appropriate coordinates. The first test would be a short jump, only about a kilometer, but if she succeeded, she’d be the first person ever to teleport. “Slipstream test commencing in three…”

Her fingers flew across the control panel, expertly activating the teleportation matrix like she’d practiced.

“Two…”

The whole plane hummed, and Lena’s hair stood on end from the charged energy.

“One!”

She hit the thumb controls. Nothing happened.

Lena’s eyes flew across the control panel. She’d done everything correctly, right? Right. No, something else had gone wrong. Oh, well. That a problem for the scientists, not her. She reached for her radio controls, shoulders sagging with disappointment, when an alarm shrieked in her ear. A light on the control panel flashed red and the teleportation matrix in front of her sparked with electricity. 

Uh-oh. 

“Ground Control, there’s a problem with the matrix, I’m coming down to land!”

Lena changed course, racing for the Watchpoint: Geneva airstrip. The matrix crackled and sparked all over her control panel. The energy building in the cockpit grew stronger and smelled of ozone, even through Lena’s helmet. 

“Roger, Tracer. Wait for clearance for Runway 04.”

“No, no! I need to land now! Something’s wrong!”

She started taking the Slipstream down in altitude, but the plane didn’t respond to her controls.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, Slipstream unresponsive, course is headed to…” 

Lena trailed off, all her military training going out the window as she watched her hand pass _through_ the controls. She stared at her hand in horror.

“What in the…”

In a blink, the plane vanished from around her, and Lena had the horrible sensation of her stomach rising up to her throat before she plunged into freefall. She screamed. Her plane was nowhere to be seen, and her parachute had been attached to her ejector seat, which vanished with the plane. She tumbled through the air and watched with horror as the roof of the Geneva Overwatch Headquarters grew closer and closer. She positioned herself like she’d been taught in flight school, feet down, arms crossed, and aimed for the building’s skylight, hoping that breaking through the glass would slow her momentum before she became a smear on the tile floor below. 

In the second before impact, Lena made the bewildering observation that, despite the fact that it was June and she’d been flying past them all morning, the mountains were inexplicably covered in snow. She hit the roof.

Except…she didn’t hit anything. Lena watched as she fell through floor after floor of the building, passing through ground and ceiling like a ghost. Her momentum finally slowed and she stood, entirely unharmed, on the ground floor. She’d landed in a conference room, surrounded by surprised faces. 

“Sorry!” Lena said. She hastily took her helmet off and set it on the table. “I seem to have–”

She blinked and everyone in the room vanished. Her helmet was gone, too. The lights were off, and the window outside indicated that it was the middle of the night. 

“Hello?”

No one answered. Cautiously, she tried to open the door to the conference room, but her hand passed through the doorknob. She frowned and looked at the offending hand and clasped her fingers of both hands together. 

Well, that seemed to work. She felt real and solid to herself, but everything else felt like it wasn’t there. Even the ground beneath her feet didn’t feel solid, more like she was just walking on air. With a lack of other options, Lena passed through the door without opening it. She needed to find someone who could help. Not sure where else to go, she headed for Winston’s lab.

She’d never been in HQ at night. Somehow, she thought it would be busier. They were a global organization, after all. Wouldn’t there be a night shift working around the clock? Or even a janitorial staff? Instead the halls were dark and quiet. Her footsteps made no sound, only adding to the unsettling silence. Well, at least Winston would be in his lab. He lived there, after all. 

As Lena walked, she grew more and more concerned. She kept passing by areas of the building that were entirely empty, even of furniture, or found rooms that looked like they were being painted. It was almost as if the building seemed unfinished. But that was ridiculous. Geneva had been Overwatch’s primary headquarters for over fifteen years.

She walked through the door to Winston’s lab and froze. This wasn’t Winston’s lab at all! Or…it was, but everything was wrong. The room was correct, of that she was certain, but it didn’t have any of Winston’s things, none of his current projects, his custom-made furniture or tractor tires, his personal belongings or pictures. Instead the lab was full of…guns? It still looked like an engineering lab, but all the projects were for weapons and armor, with a few active projects scattered about on workbenches. Lena peered at one, some kind of turret, and saw pictures thumbtacked to the wall behind the workbench. The pictures were mostly family photos, most featuring a blonde woman and a few red-headed kids. 

Lena blinked, and the pictures were gone, along with the turret. She turned around and gasped. Now the room looked like Winston’s lab, with Winston himself at the center worktable, working on a circular device.

“Winston!”

His head snapped up. 

“Lena!”

“Winston, what’s going on?” She rushed toward him.

“Lena, stay close! We’re constructing a–”

Winston vanished before her eyes, blinking right out of existence, along with the circular device he’d been working on. His workbench looked slightly different, and she even recognized the project he was working on, the booster pack he told her was his current project. An alarm sounded over the intercom. 

“Attention all staff: Slipstream has crashed into–”

The alarm stopped and it looked like night had fallen once again. Winston hunched over a set of blueprints at the workbench against the wall.

“Winston!” She cried, and she couldn’t hold back the fear in her voice. “Winston, what’s happening to me!?”

“Lena!” He turned quickly around. “The malfunction with Slipstream’s teleportation matrix has made your timeline unstable! You’re being dragged backward and forward through time, but please stay within the headquarters! I’m designing–”

Winston vanished again. The entire lab vanished. Instead, Lena stood in the smoking ruins of a building, fires still smoldering amid the wreckage. In the distance, sirens wailed through the night. To her left, she heard someone crying, pleading, the words indiscernible through sobs and the crackle of fire. A gunshot rang out, and the crying stopped.

A footstep crunched behind her. 

Lena spun around, but she was back in the lab again, intact, no wreckage to be seen. Lena broke into tears. 

“Lena, it’s okay. Don’t worry, I’m here. We’re going to fix this.”

Winson’s hand passed through her, and despair clutched at Lena’s heart. She fell to her knees and sobbed.


	7. Isolation - Doomfist

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular warnings for this chapter. Writing Akande is haaaard.

Peace brings only stagnation. With every battle, comes growth. With every war, comes change, adaptation. Strength. 

Power.

Prison did not suit Akande, but he supposed every criminal in the Helix Maximum Security facility would say that. The isolation of solitary confinement got under his skin and itched like a disease. 

The silence was truly terrible. The walls were insulated well enough that he could not hear either other prisoners or guards. His food was delivered three times a day by drones, humming, whirring machines he could hear coming from down the hall, but no human contact. The solar lights in his cell made no noise, and he couldn’t even hear the normal sounds of plumbing through his walls. For a time, he tried just leaving the sink tap on just to hear the sound of running water, anything besides the sound of his own breathing and the beat of his heart. After only sixty seconds, the water stopped. Apparently wasting water wasn’t allowed. The drones were the only source of outside sound.

The food itself was bland. It was nourishing enough, but almost tasteless, as if they wanted to deprive him of even the sensations of taste and smell. He had nothing to see outside of his cell, no contact with the outside world, nothing to hear, nothing to do. A lesser man could go mad and waste away in a place like this. It was fortunate, then, that Akande was not a lesser man.

He worked. If he had no one to war with, he would war with himself and grow stronger for it. He kept a strict, lengthy workout routine to keep himself in shape. The rest of the time he spent planning. With no outside contact, he had no idea what the world was like, so he built his own scenarios, playing out mental war games and devising tactics and strategies. He would not stagnate. He would grow stronger. But even a hunter knows to not strike early, so he waited and worked in his cell.

Finally, a day came with a change. The lunchtime drone arrived exactly on schedule and hummed and whirred to Akande’s cell. He’d learned the exact sounds of each of the five drones that brought his meals. This one was number two, and he listened to the sound like a song he had memorized.

_WhirrrrrrrHumHumWhirrrrr-bzzzn-HumHisss_

The drone stopped precisely and delivered his lunch. But then the song changed. For the first time in a year of incarceration, the drone sat outside his cell instead of continuing on. 

Akande peered out the small, barred window on his door.

“Hola, Boss!” The drone said in a cheerful, crackly-static voice. “Did you know Helix uses the same backdoor password for all their drones?”

Akande smirked. Now the real work began.


	8. Stab Wound - Soldier: 76

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this Chapter: Blood, Injury, Jack's Fatalistic Attitude

Sometimes, even idiots get lucky.

Jack liked to think he was a survivor, for better or for worse. He made it through the barely ethical experimentation hell that was the Soldier Enhancement Program. He survived actively fighting through the Omnic Crisis, the most deadly war in all of history that almost ended humanity. He lived through the height of Overwatch with a target on his back, and he somehow survived the Switzerland debacle, even though the world thought he didn’t. He’d survived terrorists, extremists, traitors, murderers, machines, and monsters.   
If he died because of one lucky idiot with a cheap-ass switchblade, he’d never forgive himself. Also, he would be dead, and that would be just embarrassing. 

Jack used the brick wall as support, his fingers leaving a smear of blood in their wake. If anyone was following him, he was leaving a hell of an easy trail to follow back to his hideout, but that was a secondary problem to the bleeding hole in his chest. At this rate, anyone on his trail would likely find his corpse by the time they caught up to him.

One lucky idiot. The kid had been some dumbass gang member. Not even a prominent, gang, like Los Muertos, just some shit local gang. A group of them had tried to mug him for his pulse rifle (as he sure as hell didn’t have any cash), and he’d taught them all a lesson. As he was walking away, one skinny kid jumped out from behind a dumpster while his head was turned and sank his cheap dollar store switchblade into Jack’s chest. Jack had promptly punched him hard enough to knock the kid clean across the alley. He probably killed the little bastard, but he was more preoccupied with his injury. Whatever the kid stabbed, it was bad. Jack was bleeding like a stuck pig and had extreme trouble breathing.

He reached his hideout, a condemned building that looked like it might have been a pawn shop before it caught fire, and at this point was little more than burned brick walls. It was free, abandoned, and offered him privacy, which was all he needed for the short amount of time he’d planned to stay in this city. He shoved his way through the hole he’d made in the boarded up door and fell to his knees as the effort strained his chest. His vision swam behind the red haze of his visor and he couldn’t breathe. 

Shit, was he going to die right here? He at least wanted to get back to his bedroll. He’d long ago accepted that he was going to die alone in some godforsaken dark corner, but he at least wanted a goddamn pillow when there was one available ten feet away. Jack remained motionless on his hands and knees, sheer determination and the will to die in comfort kept him from falling fully prone. Finally, his vision cleared and he was able to take a shaky breath. It wasn’t a good breath, he guessed he had a collapsed lung, but one lung working was better than none. He swayed to his feet and stumbled into the back room where he stashed all his shit.

Well, now that he was here, there was no point in dying without at least a token attempt to save himself. He might as well hold on until Death was literally dragging his soul kicking and bitching out of his body. He eased out of his jacket and worked off his thin undershirt. The fabric clung to his chest, sticky with blood, and Jack grimaced as the shirt peeled off his skin. He sank to the ground, leaning back against the brick wall, and examined himself.

The puncture wound was small, only about a half-inch wide, and located around three inches right of his sternum. The wound was still bleeding sluggishly, thick dark blood seeping from the wound, but at least it didn’t look like bright arterial blood. Jack grabbed the duffle bag that held his extensive first aid kit and got to work.

The angle was awkward and he was growing tired fast, so the most he was able to do was stuff the wound with gauze, patch himself up with biobandages, and slap down a biotic emitter. He lay back against the wall, and let his eyes droop as fatigue took over in the warm, healing glow of the emitter.

Hell. If he lived through this, maybe he was the lucky idiot this time.


	9. Shackled - Sigma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how to tag this. I have no idea how I wrote this. Have some Sigma.

The shackles were cold around Siebren’s wrists. Cold was good. Real. Solid. It gave him something to focus on. The metal was heavy. Hah. That assumed weight and mass had any real meaning anymore. The weight could not be trusted. Weight could fluctuate at any moment, with any whimsical change in force or mass or momentum or…or…

But the cold. The cold was real. The cold was good.

Cold was snow falling on a peaceful day. Cold was the first taste of ice cream. Cold was a night sky full of stars, stars forever, filling up everything in view, the milky way pouring through the sky, standing at the observation deck on the space station, looking out into the dark, cold void, an empty vacuum filled with wonder and secrets, the experiments, the equations, all the wonder of discovery at his fingertips, knowledge given life, the harness, the black hole, the…the alarms! Staring into ten centimeters of darkness, of infinite depth, gravity, sucked in, getting pulled in, spiraling downward down down down in further deeper no escape no escape hold it together hold it together hold it together–

The shackles were restraining. They held Siebren’s wrists to the bed, chaining him. Why? Where was he? What had he done? Why was he being imprisoned? His questions were never answered, and wasn’t that just fitting? Decades of work in theoretical physics, looking for answers that were always just out of reach. 

He tried to lift his arm to reach for the answers, but the restraints stopped him. The metal cuff clicked against the bedframe. He clicked it again. A chime. Click click clang cling ring ding sing. What note was that? B sharp?

Notes.

The music the music the music, notes ringing together in tones never heard by man, in harmonies impossible to reproduce.

What is that melody? Almost familiar but entirely new, every time he heard it. He’d been a conductor with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra in his youth. Had he conducted this piece? No, impossible. It was too beautiful, too terrible, full of whispers and promises and lies. The secrets of the universe given musical form. How fitting, that the heart of reality was music. Even a heart has a beat, a rhythm that follows us through our lives. Why not the universe?

Siebren hummed the melody aloud, but knew he wasn’t capturing it correctly. He closed his fingers as if holding a conductor’s baton and tried to count out the time signature. The restraints stopped him once again.

No! No, let him work! The melody, he had to capture it! Learn its secrets! 

He pulled against the restraints with both arms, harder harder pulling twisting! Where was he? Why was he here?! He needed to get out! Let me go let me go _let me go Let Me Go LETMEGO_

_“Release me!!!”___

_ _“Code Orange! I repeat, Code Orange! Requesting sedatives for Subject Sigma!”_ _

_ _Crashing clashing grinding crunching floating flying falling fading._ _

_ _Siebren heard screaming. It sounded like his voice. _ _

_ _A needle pricked his skin. His arms dropped and his eyes drooped. The universe spiraled into darkness. The injection flowing through his veins was cold._ _

_ _Cold. Cold like fear. Cold like fury. Cold like snow on Christmas Day._ _

_ _The cold was real. The shackles were real._ _

_ _But was he?_ _

_ _Without an answer, Siebren sank into darkness. _ _

_ _The melody followed._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was weirdly easy for me to write, which is probably a bad sign.


	10. Unconscious - Genji

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Violence, Blood and Gore, Dismemberment

So. This is what dying felt like.

The pain was gone, so that was nice. What was left of Genji’s body was going into shock, leaving him in a comfortable numbness that was much better than the agony of a few minutes ago. He lay face-down on the dojo floor, his cheek pressed against the wood. Blood pooled against his cheek and he didn’t have the strength to lift his head, instead letting the slow creep of blood cling to his shredded skin. Within his line of vision, a few feet away, he saw his own severed arm, still loosely holding his katana with limp fingers. He couldn’t see his legs, but they were somewhere around here. Not attached to him.

Fucking Hanzo. Fucking Yakuza. Fucking dragons. Fuck all this. He hoped the Elders fucking killed his shit-stain of a brother. It would be better than being used as a tool like he currently was. Fucking death. If he was gonna die, at least Death could hurry it up. There was only so long he could sprawl on the dojo floor and ruin the décor before–

Fuck. He couldn’t breathe. He’d been rasping around the hole in his gut for the past few minutes, but now he couldn’t inhale. Shit. Shit fuck this was it. His lungs finally filled with blood and he was drowning. Or something. Fuck, he didn’t know what was going on inside his diced up innards. He couldn’t _breathe!_

He gasped like a fish, making weak grunting sounds, and his head started to spin. He felt lighter, like he was floating a foot above the ground, and darkness clawed at the edges of his vision. With one last spiteful curse to the gods, dragons, spirits, and anyone else who was listening, Genji fell into darkness.

* * *

“Sp02 at 92%, ventilating at fifteen breaths per minute.”

“Let’s increase to twenty. Hand me another pack of hemostats.”

Genji drifted into a state similar to awareness. He stared blankly at lights above him and heard voices speaking in English. Did they speak English in the afterlife? They must, or else everyone who–Oh GOD he was in pain! His nerves were on fire and his sink burned where the dragonfire had scorched him. He couldn’t even localize a specific injury because _everything_ was agony. 

He made a gurgling sound that passed for a moan and tried to writhe away from whatever was hurting him.

“Dr. Zeigler, he’s waking up!”

“Increase morphine by 0.1mg/kg and increase anesthetic agent mix by 0.08mg/kg.”

Migs per kigs? What in the fuck…

The pain subsided. Before he could fade into darkness once again, he saw a face above him. Blue eyes looked into his, a beautiful face with golden hair, haloed by brilliant light. Genji only managed one last thought before he blacked out.

_Holy fucking shit. Angels were real._

* * *

The next time Genji awoke, he couldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t move at all, but at least he wasn’t in pain. He didn’t feel anything, in fact.

“–condition could change at any time. He’s barely stable as it is.”

“What are his odds?”

“Medicine is far more complex than a set of probability numbers! I can’t just tell you whether or not he’ll survive like his life is a game of chance!”

“Okay, but do _you_ think he’ll make it?”

“I think it’s a miracle he’s made it this far.”

“Yeah, but you’re a miracle worker, Angie. You’ll get him to pull through.”

“Don’t pretend you care about him! You just want him for the information he knows!”

“He’s part of a family of a lot of bad people. Bad people who tried to kill him. I just want to stop those people, and he can tell me how.”

“And I’m here to save a life! I’m not going to let you interrogate him while he’s recovering.”

“He was my informant before he was your patient, Angela.”

“W-wha…how dare…”

“Just saying.”

“Get out! Get out of my infirmary, Gabriel! Out! Of all the nerve…”

Genji tried to ask what was going on, the darkness beckoned once again, and he sank into unconsciousness once more.

* * *

Genji drifted in and out of consciousness several more times, catching snippets of conversation he didn’t understand, or getting hit with waves of pain before the darkness took over once again. He tried to understand what was happening to him, but thinking was hard, and unconsciousness was never far away.

By the time he finally fully awoke, he had pieced together two things: one, he wasn’t dead, and two, someone was trying damn hard to save his life. 

He opened his eyes to find himself in what looked like a hospital room. He felt numb and fuzzy, as if he was experiencing everything from a room away, but he was still more awake than he’d been since the dojo.

The dojo.

Oh, hell. He was afraid to look, but he needed to know.

Cautiously, Genji looked down at himself, and couldn’t hold back a horrified sob. His legs both ended in stumps just above the knee, and his right arm just didn’t exist. Nothing connected to his right shoulder; it just ended. His left arm was whole, but it and just about every inch of skin he could see was covered in bandages. He was connected to more machines than he’d ever seen in a hospital room, way more than that time he needed his stomach pumped.

Wires and tubes vanished under the bandages, connecting to him in ways he couldn’t see or understand. A monitor just barely within eyesight displayed his vitals, and he tried to make out what they said, but finally accepted that he didn’t know what the numbers meant. Multiple IV drips hung over him, vanishing into his remaining arm and into his neck. A tube connected directly into the front of his throat, and after a moment, he realized the machine was breathing for him. He tried to take a breath on his own, going against the machine’s rhythm, and was horrified when he couldn’t. A frankly horrifying amount of tubes connected to his chest and abdomen, and he had _no_ idea what they did, but if he couldn’t even breathe by himself, what else did he need help with?

Oh god. Was this what his life was like now? Was he damned to be a fucking torso strapped to a life support machine until he died? Or would the machines just keep him alive, forcing his body to keep going after his soul gave up.

Tears stun Genji’s eyes as horror washed over him, more painful than the agony from before.

He wished the darkness had taken him.


	11. Stitches - Baptiste

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Injury, Bombing

Baptiste wished he could say the explosion had been unexpected, but that would have been a lie. He knew Talon was coming for Dr. Angela Ziegler. He tried to warn her, but she’d been suspicious of his intentions. That was only fair, he admitted to himself. He was former Talon, after all. 

She was willing to accept his help once he saved her from the bomb in the humanitarian medical encampment though. He supposed when the flames died down and the dust settled, one of the extremist groups involved in the armed conflict would get the blame, but Baptiste knew who was really at fault.

Talon or no Talon, it still didn’t change the fact that the encampment was in flames and fading further into the distance. Guilt gnawed at the inside of his gut as he pressed the stolen jeep harder and fled across the desert landscape. All those people… Hundreds of innocents, dead or dying, and Baptiste abandoned them all. No, worse than that. Baptiste abandoned them and stole their best chance at survival.

Not that there was much left to save after the bomb. He looked over at his charge in the passenger seat. Dr. Ziegler was still out cold, exhausted from the ordeal. She was filthy; soot, grime, and blood ground into the fabric of her scrubs, into her hair, and smeared across her angelic face. They only reason they got out alive was due to his immortality field. He hadn’t been able to save anyone else.

He didn’t have a choice, he told himself. Talon agents were actively hunting for Dr. Ziegler, and if they had stayed to help, they would both be dead by now.  
Finally, the landscape grew rockier, rolling hills rising into canyons and sheer cliffs, and Baptiste found a suitable hollow large enough to hide both the jeep and themselves from prying eyes or aerial drones. He killed the jeep and rubbed his eyes.

As the rumbling jeep engine fell silent, Dr. Ziegler awoke at the change. She looked around blearily and rubbed at one eye.

“Where are we?”

“About eighty miles south of the camp. I don’t have a map or GPS, so that’s as good as I’ve got. I thought it would be a good idea to take a rest and get our game plan together,” Baptiste hopped into the backseat. He didn’t have time to grab anything more than his own pack on the way out, and started digging through the backseat to see what supplies were in the stolen jeep.

“I wholeheartedly agree,” Dr. Ziegler said. She clasped her fingers together and stretched.

“Looks like we have at least a day’s worth of rations, more if we don’t mind being hungry. There’s a back of water bottles, so we at least have that going for us, so long as we can figure out where we are.”

“You said we went South? Do you know what road we–Ah! You’re bleeding!” 

“Huh?” Baptiste looked down to find blood dripping onto the plastic-wrapped bottles. “Oh, I…Wow. Adrenaline’s a hell of an anesthetic, am I right?”

“Let me get a look at you,” She clambered into the backseat. 

“Hey now! You’re injured, too! Don’t pretend that bloodstain on your calf isn’t yours!”

“Well then, I guess we’ll both just have to patch each other up, won’t we, Dr. Augustin?” she said, already starting to examine him with a shrewd eye. 

“Please, it’s just Baptiste. I’m no doctor, just a combat medic.”

“You’re ‘just’ a combat medic? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen combat medics save lives. Just because you’re not scrubbing into surgery at a hospital doesn’t mean you’re not important. And you can’t tell me that ‘just’ a combat medic could invent that contraption you showed back there. Shirt off, please.”

Baptiste shrugged out of his shirt, and hissed as the action stretched a painful gash across his left shoulder that his body had been stubbornly ignoring. Dr. Ziegler tutted and examined the wound more closely.

“You mean the immortality field? It’s just a work in progress, it’s far from finished.”

“Finished enough to save our lives. This is deep. What do we have to work with?”

“I didn’t see much in the jeep, but I’ve got a basic field med kit in my pack…” He pulled away from Dr. Ziegler to grab the aforementioned back only to receive a sharp swat on his uninjured arm.

“None of that, now! You take a seat and don’t strain that shoulder!” She started digging through his pack and Baptiste was inclined to let her.

He obediently took a seat.

“I used my last biobandages on that kid that came in yesterday with the GSW and–”

Dead. That teenager he’d helped at the camp yesterday was almost certainly dead now. The silence stretched between them. Finally, Dr. Ziegler retrieved what she wanted out of Baptiste’s meager supplies and took a seat behind him.

“We can’t save them all,” she said softly. “You knew Talon was coming for me and tried to warn me, but there’s no way we…neither of us could have known Talon would…”

“I should have,” Baptiste muttered, and he could taste the bitterness in his voice. “I should have known the lengths they’d go to.”

“What should we have done?” she asked, gently cleaning out the wound. Baptiste flinched at the sting of alcohol, but didn’t interrupt. 

“Should we have searched for a bomb we didn’t know was there?” She continued. “Evacuated the camp with nowhere to go? Even if I hadn’t been so…resistant, and we left as soon as you arrived, Talon would not have known we left and bombed the camp anyway.”

Baptiste put his face in his hands and made a frustrated noise.

“You’re right. I know you’re right. But it doesn’t mean I like it.”

“The fact that you think that way means leads credence to the fact that I should have trusted you from the beginning. Now hold still, I’m going to suture this. Do you have needle drivers?”

“Inside back pocket. They’re not sterile.”

“None of this is. I want you on antibiotics as soon as we can get some. I’m glad you had enough alcohol to at least moderately sterilize tools. I just wish we had some of the drinkable variety.” 

That surprised a laugh out of him.

“God, I wish. What’s your poison?”

“Brandy. Yours?”

“Rum.” He felt Dr. Ziegler stitching his shoulder up with quick, precise motions, but the sharp prick of the needle was nothing compared to the sting of alcohol cleaning his wound earlier. “If this is you asking me out for drinks after we get to safety, I am all in. Twist my arm to have a drink after this mess.”

“Agreed. And don’t twist your arm, incidentally.” She snipped the last of the suture and sat back.

Already? That was quick, even by Baptiste’s standards. He gently rolled his shoulder, testing his range of motion with the sutures.

“Thank you, Dr. Ziegler. I appreciate it.”

“Please, just Angela is fine.”

“Angela,” he grinned. “Alright, let’s put our heads together. We’re not out of this yet.”


	12. Don't Move - Zarya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No tags for this chapter

“How much longer?” Zarya didn’t look back at Lynx17, keeping her eyes on the war-torn landscape out the window. She’d never been this deep into enemy territory, and certainly never this close to the Siberian Omnium. They were in what used to be an office building, long since abandoned, but with enough undamaged electronics to get what they needed.

“I think I’ve almost got it,” Lynx17 worked at the console, their synthetic fingers tapping against the keyboard.   
A keyboard! An actual, physical keyboard, not a holopad. And Lynx17 was plugged into the tower with a physical _wire_. A USB cable, they had said. There was no monitor or holoprojector, but Lynx17 said they didn’t need one while directly interfacing. Zarya wondered how long this place had been abandoned for it to have such old tech. Old or not, if Lynx17 could get the data they needed, it might be enough evidence for the both of them to end this fake war. 

“Almost there…just need to copy the files and–” Lynx17 cut off with burst of static.

Zarya snapped her head over to see the omnic stiffen. 

“What? What is it?” 

“I’ve tripped an alarm!” Their fingers flew faster over the keyboard.

“You what? We have to go!” 

“No, I almost have it! I just need another seventy-eight seconds and I’ll have the data!”

“We don’t have the time!” Zarya hefted up the particle cannon.

“If we leave now, everything we done will have been for nothing!”

“If we don’t leave now, we are going to get killed!”

“You don’t–” Lynx17 cut off, their antennae lifting like a rabbit picking up a sound. “They’re coming. Hide! Under the desk!”

“If we kill them, they can’t send reinforcements!”

“If you don’t kill them fast enough, they’ll send out a signal for reinforcements and we’ll have to fight all the way back to the Front!”

Zarya hesitated.

“Hurry!”

She let out a growl of frustration, but clambered under the desk beside Lynx17. They barely fit, Zarya’s muscular form taking up most of the space, with Lynx17 pressed against her, the cable still connected to them as they frantically kept downloading. Finally, Zarya heard a faint hum, growing louder with each second.

“Don’t…move…” Lynx17 whispered, and went deathly still in the way that only a machine could.

Zarya raised the collar on her heavy parka to cover her nose and mouth and fell silent, focusing on holding still. The mechanical humming grew louder, high and shrill. Zarya couldn’t see the door from this angle, but a shadow passed across the floor and stopped.

The monotone hum continued, and a red beam of light passed through the room. Zarya tensed and tightened her grip on her particle cannon. Lynx17 closed their fingers over hers, and Zarya flicked her gaze in their direction. As an omnic, they couldn’t express emotion with their face, but she’d been with Lynx17 long enough to understand what the motion meant.

_Please. Please don’t. Please trust me._

Zarya remained still. The beam of light passed over the desk, then shut off. The enemy omnic drone churned with a groaning, whirring noise, then left the room. They remained motionless until the humming faded into the distance, the drone returning to its patrol path. Zarya relaxed her grip and sighed. 

“…Thank you,” Lynx17 squeezed back out from under the desk and unplugged the USB from their neck. “I’ve got the data we need. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They offered a hand to help Zarya to her feet.

“I couldn’t agree more.” She accepted Lynx17’s cold, metal hand. 

How strange it was, Zarya thought as they started the long, dangerous trek back to the Front. All this time she spent fighting omnics, and it was one rabbit-eared sarcastic omnic she trusted more than anyone else.

The world was truly changing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look. _Look._ I know this doesn’t make sense if you think about it too long and it's vaguely OOC. I’m not gonna fill in those plot holes.


	13. Adrenaline - Lucio (1/2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter.

“I can go in solo. Easier to infiltrate one person than a whole team.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“I know their security systems. I’ve done this before.”

“The risk is too great!”

“Winston, trust me! I can do this!”

“No! We hold position. Study the security. Develop a plan.”

“I _am_ a plan!”

“_No._ You are to stay with the team. Once we have a plan, we will work / as a team and do this together.”

“There isn’t enough time! By the time we figure out what we’re doing, Vishkar will have already–”

“Lucio, _stop._ That is an order. Do you understand?”

“Tch. Yeah, I got it.”

Just because Lucio understood didn’t mean he agreed, and he was never much one for respecting authority. Winston was a great guy and Overwatch was doing amazing work, but Lucio knew Vishkar. He knew they didn’t have time to wait around and decide what to do. He could get in, get the evidence they needed, and get out. After all, he’d done it before.

That night, Lucio snuck out and headed for the giant Vishkar corporate office alone. He shed his usual outfit for dark grey and black clothing and his dreadlocks were tucked under a beanie to keep them out of the way. He’d removed the LEDs from his equipment, so the only source of light on his person was his hardlight skates, which he’d only use if he absolutely had to. A specialized set of earbuds clung to his ears under the beanie. He flicked his fingers to activate the appropriate track.

While “We Move Together as One” improved his speed and coordination and “Rejuvenescência” stimulated cellular reconstruction, neither of those were tonight’s track. “Hard Light, Hard Time” was an adrenaline boost. The song was aptly named, and Lucio had composed it with his previous battles with Vishkar in mind. As the synth beat and carefully constructed notes rang in his ears, his determination solidified and a grin split his face.

He could do this. He would be the instrument to bring Vishkar down, and nothing could stop him! Emboldened and heart swelling with courage, Lucio dove in.

For a while, everything was perfect. The security systems were just like he remembered and he easily evaded guards and drones. Hyped on adrenaline and confidence, he didn’t stop to think it was strange that the building layout was identical to the office he’d infiltrated in Brazil. At least, not until he reached the server room and the door locked shut behind him.

A hologram sprang into existence before him, showing the image of a Vishkar executive, a bored look on his face. 

“Thank you for your cooperation, Lucio Correia dos Santos. Please lay down your weapon and surrender peacefully.”

“W-what?”

“Oh, come now. You didn’t think we wouldn’t update our security after your little escapade in Rio, did you? Though manipulating you into thinking so was surprisingly easy.”

Heart hammering, the adrenaline in his veins took a different tone. He’d been had. Curse it all, this Vishkar stooge was right. He fell right into their trap. Well, there was no way he was going to give up. Lucio turned his sonic amplifier to the door and scaled a dial on the side all the way up. 

“You won’t be saying that when I skate on out of here!” Lucio pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Heartrate spiking, Lucio checked the amplifier. Was it malfunctioning? Why didn’t it fire?

“Come now. The sonic technology in your hands belongs to Vishkar. We know exactly how it works…and how to counter it.”

A pulse of energy washed through the room, killing the electronics on Lucio’s person. As his headphones died, he was able to hear white noise emanating from somewhere unseen. Something in the white noise had nullified his amplifier. 

Frantically, he tried rebooting the amp. Maybe if he could alter the frequency he could–

“Enough.”

A hardlight turret materialized out of thin air. Lucio dodged the first two blasts, but didn’t see the two other turrets materializing behind him. A blast of energy caught him square in the back and sent him careening head over heels. His head cracked against the floor and he knew no more.


	14. Tear-Stained - Symmetra (2/2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Mild violence, implied murder. Continuation from previous chapter.

_The child looked up at her, tears making trails across her dirty, grubby cheeks. _

_“We’re making her life better, right? We’re making all their lives better.”_

_“Of course we are. This will only be a temporary displacement.”_

_“They’ll all have housing? Better, beautiful, clean?”_

_“Suitable to their station, yes. We have to look at the larger picture, Satya. They are one small piece in the greater order.”_

_“And that is why the corporate office must be constructed first.”_

_“Exactly.”_

_“What will happen to this child?”_

_“She will be taken care of. We’re making the world a better place.”_

* * *

“I’m happy to have you here, Satya. This criminal is the same individual responsible for the chaos in Rio de Janeiro.”

Satya pulled herself out of her thoughts as Sanjay addressed her.

“You’ve come a long way. I think you deserve to have a say in his fate after all the hardship he caused you there. And if this meeting goes well, I may have another organization to introduce to you. A silent sponsor who has been assisting Vishkar.”

Satya was taken aback.

“A sponsor? You mean one of our investors?”

Sanjay gave her one of his small, calm smiles. “You could say that. We have a mutually beneficial relationship, and they also want to change the world.”

The door opened and the prisoner was dragged in. Satya was shocked to see that she recognized him.

“Lucio? The musician?” Satya asked.

“Musician, celebrity, and terrorist. He is responsible for the uprising in Brazil. He uses his fame and financial success to inspire rebellion wherever he goes.”

Satya bit her lip. This was different. This was…unexpected, and it made her uncomfortable. Her thumb rubbed small circles against the smooth, cool resin of her prosthetic hand. The tactile sensation was familiar and comforting, but it only helped a little. She wished Sanjay would have told her instead of just confronting her with Lucio in person like this. Then she could have had more time to mentally prepare for the change in worldview.

“And I’ll keep doing it, too!” Lucio shouted. “You Vishkar tyrants will never stop the people from rising up and taking their freedom!” 

His hands were bound behind his back with hardlight cuffs and a security guard held him by either arm. Messy, disorderly dreadlocks hung around his shoulders and he wore only standard issue Vishkar slacks and long-sleeved shirt. They were ill-fitting, hanging too loose around his shoulders and knees, and he was barefoot. The skin around his right eye was darkened with a bruise. As Satya watched, a drop of blood fell from his nose and landed on his shirt, a drop of red ruining the crisp, clean white linin.

“Yes, yes. We know.” Sanjay said, and pulled up a holoscreen. “Lucio Correia dos Santos, you are charged with–”

“Charged? You can’t charge me with anything, you aren’t the police! You don’t have the authority of a government or a legal system!”

Sanjay continued as if Lucio hadn’t interrupted. “You are charged with trespassing, theft, disorderly conduct, espionage…”

Satya tuned Sanjay out as she focused on Lucio. Something was wrong. The evidence of what she saw before her did not add up with what she had been told. The intruder had been peacefully detained with sonic technology, Sanjay had told her. Then why did Lucio have a black eye and a bloody nose? She looked him over more carefully and her sharp eyes caught dried blood in his hair and a spot on his shoulder where blood was seeping through the white shirt. The guards also weren’t just securing him, he was _leaning_ on them. He wasn’t putting any weight on his left foot.

“…and terrorism. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“Sanjay…” Satya asked quietly before Lucio could reply. “…Why is he injured?”

Sanjay gave her a frown. “He resisted our attempts to detain him.”

“_Resisted?!_" Lucio’s voice cracked with incredulity. “You call laying handcuffed on the floor while your goons kick me around _resisting?_”

One of the security guards smirked and Satya shifted in her seat. She rubbed her synthetic hand more insistently. 

“I don’t believe this!” Lucio raged. “Oh. Wait. I _do_ believe this. You’re _Vishkar._”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Satya asked. “We bring order to chaos. We are making the world a better place! We were making Rio a better place, and you sabotaged it.”

Lucio laughed, a hard, bitter sound. “You call that ‘better?’ People restricted by curfews, being told what to do, what to eat, where to go, how to live? Literally exploiting the people as cheap labor? All in repayment for living in little white hardlight prisons cells and claiming they were our homes.”

“A shame,” Sanjay said. “You could have had Utopia, and instead you stole Vishkar technology and created chaos.”

“It’s not stealing if it’s mine to begin with.”

Satya scoffed. “Yours? In what way is our sonic technology yours?”

Lucio’s dark face flushed and tears of fury ran down his cheeks. “You stole it from my father! He was a Vishkar employee and you stole it from him and then _murdered_ him when he tried to stand up to you!”

Satya clutched her hands together under the table, skin on smooth resin.

“Is this true?” Satya looked at Sanjay with shock.

“Who are you going to believe? A known and proven criminal or myself?” His lips drew a hard line and his tone was harsh. “You know, Satya, I’m a little disappointed at your conduct. I thought you were ready for this.”

Satya averted her eyes, looking at her clasped hands instead.

“I think that we’ve heard enough. Congratulations, Lucio. You get to be more like your father than you ever realized. Take him away.”

Satya snapped her head up just in time to see the smirking guard’s grin widen into something cruel. The second guard looked bored, cold and distant.

“You monster!” Lucio jerked forward, but couldn’t break the grip of the guards and they started hauling him back to the doors.

Satya looked at Sanjay, a protest on her lips, but the merciless look in his eyes stopped her cold. Had he always looked like this? A smile on his lips and a soulless emptiness in his eyes? 

The doors opened.

Lucio was going to die.

Satya burst into action. She leapt over the table and sprinted toward the guards. She knew she could not take them both in a physical fight, but she didn’t need to. With speed, surprise, and the strength of her prosthetic arm, she caught Lucio around the waist and used her momentum to keep going, pulling him out of the grip of both shocked guards. She couldn’t carry Lucio, but she could push him forward a good five feet before she spun around to face the guards. They both reached into their coats, doubles reaching for firearms, but Satya raised her hands and the hardlight generator in her prosthetic palm glowed. With a single sweep of her arms, a wall burst into existence, slicing through the hallway and blocking the path. 

Satya turned to Lucio.

“Can you run?”

“No, I’m pretty sure my ankle is broken.”

“Then lean on me. Hurry! That won’t hold for long!”

Satya put an arm around Lucio’s waist and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Together, they limped for the nearest teleporter room. She focused on the feeling of Lucio’s lean, firm form against her, the smooth texture of the shirt cloth, the weight of his arm over her shoulders, the rhythm of step-step-limp-step to quickly and efficiently move without further exacerbating Lucio’s injury. She focused on anything that let her avoid thinking about the broader picture of what she was doing, what Sanjay would think, what this would mean for her career, her future, her existence.

The fact that her entire life had been in service of a lie.

No time to think about that now. Thinking would trigger a panic attack and there was no _time_. One foot in front of the other. Listen to the sound of Lucio’s sharp breathing. Left at the next hallway, into the teleporter room and–

Shrill alarms filled the air.

“Guess word’s out that we’re making a break for it. What’s the plan?”

“We are going to escape with a teleporter, but I need to reconfigure the coordinates to deposit us outside instead of at another Vishkar facility and then self-destruct so they cannot follow us.”

She dropped to one knee and began working frantically, making sense of the complex patterns and numbers in the hardlight equations and interworkings.

“There! Now we stand here and…”

The door burst in just in time for the pair to disappear in a burst of blue light. They reappeared in a city park, at least two miles away. 

The sirens vanished in exchange for the sounds of a city slowly waking up, cars in the distance, birds in the trees. A breeze drifted through the air.

Lucio pumped a fist and cheered. 

“That was amazing! The way you just burst out of there and–…Hey. Hey, are you okay?”

Satya dropped to her knees and clutched at herself. She let out a sob and fell apart, tears making trails down her cheeks.

There was no going back.


	15. Scarred - Reinhardt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter. It's also super short. Ahhhhh Junkenstein is tomorrow! How am I gonna write and play at the same time??

Reinhardt wiped shower steam off the mirror with a hand. Bah. It just smeared, leaving streaks of condensation across the glass. He balled up a towel and wiped the mirror clean before wrapping the towel around his waist. Much better. He leaned forward over the counter and started trimming his beard with smooth, practiced motions. He could shave this beard in his sleep, he’d kept the same style for so many years: long to short, adjust the clippers as needed, start from the edges and work inward. He leaned further over the counter, holding his head just right so he could watch what he was doing with his one good eye. A nerve contracted into a spasm in his back and he was forced to pull away from the mirror. 

Ack, already? He wasn’t finished! His complaining back wouldn’t relent, and Reinhardt had to give up and set the razor down for the moment. He regarded himself in the mirror. When did he get old? When had time snuck up behind him and cursed him with age, forcing his blond hair to fade to white, and wrinkles pull at his eyes and cheeks? When did the scars littering his body stop being the symbol of youthful adventure and become the marks of a worn, weathered knight?

He rubbed at his lower back, trying to soothe it.

Perhaps he became old during the mission to El Salvador, when he’d broken his shoulder. Or perhaps Singapore, when he had that knee injury that was never quite the same. Or Helsinki, when he’d fallen down the stairs, of all things, and broken his hip. He ran a thumb along the old scar over his left eye.

Or maybe it was when Overwatch told him enough was enough and forced him to retire. 

The memory was sour and sharp, even after all these years, and Reinhardt shied away from it.

Maybe he’d become old the moment he left the crusaders, when he’d lost Balderich, when he’d lost the naïve sense of invulnerability that all young people had. 

Reinhardt sighed a deep, heavy breath. There was no going back, only inevitably and indisputably forward. 

His back settled down and he picked the clippers up once again. 

Maybe he was a fool to cling to the youth he’d lost, determined to live a life of glory and noble adventure, helping those in need. But maybe there was room in the world for old fools like him.


	16. Pinned Down - Junkrat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No real tags apply here, but I'd like to tag for Junkrat's stupidity anyway.

Well, this was a fine how d’you do.

The explosion had gone off beautifully, and Junkrat wasn’t quite sure how a boom that gorgeous could go so wrong. The bombs were all of his own design, so he knew his mixes were correct (though he always eyeballed his measurements instead of wasting his time with things like scales and grams and math). The wall had made the appropriate thunk sound for the right size of explosive. He’d even happened to have enough fuse line instead of short-fusing it. And yet, somehow he was pinned under chunks of drywall, cinderblock, and rebar. 

He lay sprawled on his back, arms splayed to his sides, legs a tangle below him. Hell, he was a skinny bloke. Surely he could just wiggle free.

Junkrat started squirming, and the rubble grumbled and shifted. Concrete dust filled the air, drifting into his nose. He sneezed and his whole body jolted, shifting the rubble enough to collapse on him further.

Peachy.

His head was turned to one side, debris pressed on either one of his cheeks, and he couldn’t move his arms. Well, he couldn’t move his good arm, at least. Bugger if he could tell what the fake one was doing. His legs were in the same pickle, too. Trapped.

Pinned under a half-ton of demolished building, unable to move, Junkrat reflected that this, by far, wasn’t the worst scrape he’d been in and settled on making a plan. He couldn’t move because he was trapped. He was trapped because there was rubble. If he got rid of the rubble, he could more, and he wouldn’t be trapped anymore. The best way to get rid of rubble was to blow it up. Ergo, if he could reach that stick of dynamite down the back of his shorts, he’d be in the clear!

He tried to reach down only to find that his arms were still trapped.

Damn.

Okay. Plan B. Dynamite was still a go, but the arms were no good. Junkrat wiggled his hips, trying to work the stick of dynamite out of his back pocket. The rubble shifted around him again as he fussed and a chunk of cinderblock fell and nailed him in the crown jewels.

He took a minute to recover.

Maybe a few minutes.

Okay. Dynamite was a no-go. Plan Three. If he could squeeze his head free enough to reach the grenade on his chest strap, he could pull the pin with his teeth and he’d be out of here! He was just about to go for it when he heard familiar heavy footsteps.

“Roadie! Roadie, I’m stuck! The bomb went off too soon and now I can’t reach m’dynamite!”

The footsteps stopped.

“You hurt?” Came the familiar, gravelly voice.

“Wot? No, ‘m just stuck!” 

Actually, now that he mentioned it, Junkrat did taste blood in his mouth and his good ankle spiked with pain. He’d been blown up so many times that pain was relative, and all of it was less pressing than being stuck.

“Might be a bit scraped, actually. No biggie!”

Somewhere unseen, Roadhog sighed and started clearing the rubble.

“Idiot.”


	17. "Stay with me." - Hanzo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Blood, Near Death Experience, Suicidal Thoughts (ish.)   
Pairing for this chapter: McHanzo

Hanzo never saw the shooter. He didn’t even hear the shot coming. He was changing position, moving from high ground to low, headed toward the rendezvous point. The impact hit him in the back and drove him to his knees. For a moment, Hanzo was confused. What was that? He felt like he’d been hit by a baseball bat, but there was no one else around.   
The rifle shot echoed through the canyon as the sound only now caught up with the bullet. He looked down to see blood blossoming across his front. _Then_ the pain hit. Fire burned through his abdomen and Hanzo collapsed onto his side. 

“Sniper,” he gasped out to his comm. “To the…”

He trailed off, trying to think through the agony radiating through him. He’d been shot in the back and the mountains were to his – oh god, it hurt – his left, so…

“…the north.”

“Acknowledged, what’s your status?” McCree’s voice crackled in his ear.

“I am incapacitated. I am–” Hanzo made the grievous mistake of attempting to move and a wave of agony washed over him. He groaned, but failed at forming anything close to words.

“Hanzo? Hanzo!”

From there, the voices in his comm faded to nonsense as he lost the ability to comprehend over the pain. He knew he should be doing something useful, like putting pressure on the wound or elevating his legs, but what was the point? Isn’t this what he’d wanted? An excuse to die? He was too much of a coward to take his own life, but hadn’t he spent the last ten years wishing for death to find him? Why fight it?

Breathing became difficult, each breath harsh and wet. He coughed and tasted blood. The comm was still chittering in his ear, but it made as much sense as white noise. He hoped his team at least took out the sniper before they came to collect his body. He’d hate if someone else died on his behalf.

It was a mercy that Genji wasn’t on this mission, Hanzo thought with no small measure of guilt. He didn’t want his brother to see him like this. Didn’t want to say goodbye after the pain and loss and regret and forgiveness they’d been through. Who would be the first to find him? Angela, flying in desperately on Valkyrie wings to save him? Reinhardt, who would then carry his corpse in his massive arms? McCree?

A pain shot through his heart that had nothing to do with the gunshot wound in his gut. Oh, McCree… McCree, with his voice like honeyed butter and his smile like a sunset, comforting and bright, with a hint of sadness of the oncoming night. McCree, with skeletons in his closet that rivaled Hanzo’s own, and subsequently the only person who truly understood Hanzo’s trauma. McCree, who listened to Hanzo’s woes and shared advice instead of judgement, and who gratefully accepted Hanzo’s advice when their positions were reversed. His drinking buddy, his training partner, his companion, his friend. The man who was more alike Hanzo than anyone in the world, and yet so different in all the right ways.

McCree, the man to which Hanzo had never confessed his feelings for. And now it was too late. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could live long enough to see McCree one last time.

A rock pressed uncomfortably against his cheek. How strange, that with all the pain he was in, something as simple as a pebble bothered him. Maybe the pain was lessening with the blood loss. It was hard to tell. 

His heart fluttered in his chest, frantically trying to circulate what blood Hanzo had left and not understanding that it was just making him bleed out faster. His breath was quick and shallow and cold settled around his limbs. 

He closed his eyes. At last, he could embrace death and finally find peace. 

“_Hanzo!!!_”

Pain tore through him as someone rolled him onto his back, but he let out little more than a whimper.

“Hanzo! Oh, Hanzo…No, nononono…”

Someone was manhandling him and ripped his kyudo-gi open.

“Hell…God, no…”

Hanzo recognized the voice and forced his eyes open. McCree swam in and out of focus above him as he tried to slow the bleeding.

“M...Mc…Cree?”

“Hanzo! Oh God, oh no, I couldn’t get here sooner! Ang is on her way, she’ll have you fixed up right as rain, just hold on!”

Hanzo could have smiled. Of all the prayers for the universe to answer, seeing McCree once more was an unexpected kindness.

“…thank you. Please…take care…of Genji…for me…”

McCree froze for a moment.

“No…no, don’t you do that. Don’t you _dare_.” McCree took his hand, closing his fingers around him. “Stay with me, alright? Just stay with me. I can’t lose you, too!”

Maybe it was the fear in McCree’s voice, or the tears in his eyes, or the way his hand trembled around his own, but something changed within Hanzo as he came to a dawning realization.

McCree didn’t want him to die. McCree was actively upset at the prospect of Hanzo’s death. And…if that was true, then weren’t there others who would also be upset if Hanzo was gone? Mei? Satya? 

…Genji?

Maybe…maybe there was a reason to live. Even if he couldn’t find a reason for himself, maybe he could live for those who cared about him. And maybe with their help, he could find his own reason to live.

Hanzo’s hand closed around McCree’s and his will strengthened. He would survive this. He would live.

“Stay with me…”


	18. Muffled Scream - D.Va

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No tags for this chapter. It is very short, just a sweet, sharp slice of emotion.

Silence fell as the engines and the fusion core died. No beeping alarms, no flashing lights, just…nothing. The controls in Hana’s hands might as well have been gaming joysticks, for all the good they did. Without power, Hana’s MEKA unit Tokki retained a few dozen more feet of upward momentum, then fell toward the ocean below. 

“Mayday, mayday, I’ve been hit by some kind of EMP blast! MEKA unresponsive, requesting assistance! D.Mon! King! Can anyone hear me? Dae-hyun?!”

Silence greeted her and the MEKA continued to fall.

They hit the water’s surface with a crash that jolted Hana in the cockpit restraints. The ocean closed over her and she frantically worked the controls, trying to reboot the auxiliary power. She sank deeper and deeper, the light fading as she fell into the endless ocean.

Something great and terrible moved in the depths. 

A glowing, red eye fixed its sight upon her.

The ocean swallowed her scream.


	19. Asphyxiation - Wrecking Ball

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter.

The plan worked perfectly. The grappling hook, the modifying a fuel cell into a tag-along pod, Specimen 28’s ignorance, it all came together just as he planned.

The bay doors opened and 28’s escape pod burned rocket fuel to escape the moon’s gravity. The grappling hook pulled tight and he was thrown back against the far end of the tag-along pod. That was fine, it was good. He knew there would be g-force upon launch, even if he’d never experienced it himself. He clenched his teeth and held on for dear life. Then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped, and he floated in zero gravity. He looked out the observation window to see Horizon Lunar Colony and the moon’s surface growing further and further away. Success.

Hammond was a fucking genius.

He supposed it would have been easier to just collaborate with Specimen 28 and escape together, but after all the chaos over the past week, he wasn’t willing to trust an ape, even a supposedly altruistic one. 28 was a great guy and all, but wasn’t going to take his chances with a mammal who could crush him with two fingers. No, he was better on his own.  
He kicked off the wall of the small pod and propelled himself to the other side. Weightlessness! True zero gravity! He was born on the moon, and had never experienced zero gravity. This was great! Now, all he had to do was sit tight, enjoy some free floating, brace for impact, and he’d been free! With nothing else to do, he settled in and watched the moon fade into the distance. He wished there was an observation window on the other side to let him watch the Earth get bigger.

What would Earth be like? He’d seen pictures and vids, but nothing more. He heard the human scientists talk about temperatures and weather, but Horizon was kept at the same balmy temperature and humidity. What would it like to live somewhere hot? Cold? Humid? Dry? And what would he prefer? He was excited to see it all, explore the world!

The pod jolted and Hammond snapped out of his thoughts. The moon vanished from the observation window as the pod began to spin. What? That wasn’t right! Hammond floated over to the window, trying to get a better view of what had happened. A flash of blue filled the window as the Earth rolled into view, and a tendril of black and yellow floated into view with it.

The tether. The tether had snapped! He wasn’t attached to 28’s pod anymore, he was free floating in space! 

The Earth faded from view, replaced by the starry black of space, then the white of the moon once more. White. Black. Blue. Black. White, black, blue, black whiteblackblueblack faster and faster as the pod spun out of control.

Hammond pulled away from the window before he could get dizzy. 

Okay. Well. He was still getting pulled in by Earth’s gravity, and the pod would still survive reentry, he just couldn’t rely on 28’s piloting to trust landing somewhere safe. He had a good chance of landing in the ocean, which would suck. He packed a good amount of rations, but that would only get him so far. Worst case scenario, he could activate the emergency distress beacon he installed and get picked up by a bunch of humans who would doubtless try to imprison him again.

That was inconvenient, but not a problem. He’d escaped before, he could escape again, especially if he played dumb. This was a hitch in the plan, but nothing he couldn’t deal with. This was fine.

The broken tether cable whipped backwards as the pod spun and lashed against the surface. The observation window cracked. Air escaped with a hiss, the release in pressure only spinning the pod faster.

Okay. That might be a problem. In hindsight, maybe installing an observation window was introducing a significant structural weakness. 

Hammond burst into action. What did he have in the pod? Tools? Food? Tech? None of that would patch glass. Wait! Didn’t he grab tape? He dug through his supplies. 

There! Gorilla tape! (Hah.) Now if he could just…

The tape was strong and his arms were small, and he struggled to tear the tape off, even after giving himself a notch with a sharp bite from his incisors. Meanwhile, the air was still rapidly escaping, the cracks spreading like spiderwebs across the window. Not that he’d seen a spider in person. Hell, if he didn’t survive this, he never would!

It was getting harder to breathe. The air was noticeably thinner and his breath was growing faster to try and keep up. 

There! One piece off, now to apply it to the window…

The tape patch seemed to work, but the cracks had spread through the window and he needed more. He started to feel dizzy and light-headed. He lost his grip on the curved wall of the pod and floated into the center. 

No! No, he needed to keep working! He clung to the tape and struggled to get another piece off. 

Breathing was very difficult now. He gasped, but still couldn’t get enough oxygen, and he dropped the tape and weakly reached for it, but it floated teasingly just out of reach. His vision swam and started to go dark.

Death by poor window design. How embarrassing.

The Earth was closer than ever, and a roar filled his ears as the pod hit the atmosphere. He blacked out.

When he came to, the pod was still and silent. Light shone through the broken window and a breeze drifted through.

Air? He’d made it! He landed! 

He kicked open the hatch and took in his first view on Earth. A desert landscape greeted him, rocks, canyons, and a sprawling scrappy city in the distance. The air was hot and dry. Hammond grinned and looked to the sky. Blue! Beautiful blue skies with a few wispy clouds.

The moon hung above him, small, distant, and harmless. He shook a fist at it.

Not today, bitch!

A grin on his face, Hammond hopped out of the pod and on to his next adventure.


	20. Trembling - Pharah

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No tags for this chapter

Alarms screamed through the base and red lights flashed, casting angry shadows on the walls. Gunshots fired elsewhere in the base, and little Fareeha squeaked and squeezed her eyes shut. She cowered under the rec room air hockey table, clutching the edge of her little yellow sundress, and cried.

She’d been playing a game of air hockey with Sojourn while they waited for Mama to get out of a meeting when the alarms started. Sojourn told her to hide under the table and she’d come back for her, but that was forever ago and the alarms kept going and now there was gunfire!

What was happening? Were they being attacked? By who? Who would attack an Overwatch Base? And what would happen if the bad guys found her?

A series of gunshots rang out, closer this time, and someone screamed. Fareeha covered her ears and trembled from head to toe.

_Please…Sojourn…Mama…someone save me…_

The door slammed open with a bang and Fareeha squeaked.

“Fareeha?”

Jesse held the door open, his gun in his hand. 

“Jesse!” Fareeha started to climb out from under the table, but stopped when Jesse held a hand up. 

“You’d best stay hidden, darlin’.”

“W-what’s going on?” She retreated back under the table.

“Someone’s layin’ an attack. You stay put until we’ve got things settled and someone comes get you, okay?”

“You’re l-leaving me??” 

“Just for a minute, pumpkin. I just need you to sit tight and I’ll–”

“Freeze!” A soldier in all black, nothing like the Overwatch blues, emerged from the door behind Jesse. He held an assault rifle at Jesse’s exposed back. “Hands up! Try to turn around and I’ll shoot!”

Jesse froze and Fareeha shrank further under the table. The soldier hadn’t seen her, just Jesse.

“Hey now, partner. Let’s not do anything hasty.”

“I said hands up! What security clearance do you have?”

Slowly, Jesse raised his hands, his revolver still in hand. “Clearance 02. How about we take a deep breath, leave this room, and talk about this?”

“Drop the gun! You’re coming with me!” The soldier barked.

Fareeha’s heart raced. If Jesse was unarmed, there was nothing to stop this soldier from getting whatever he wanted from Jesse and then killing him after. She would never see her big brother Jesse again.

Something tightened within her, a resolve made of steel. Maybe it was time for her to stop waiting to be saved, and time to start being brave. The air hockey puck sat on the floor beside her. Squaring her shoulders, Fareeha grabbed the puck and emerged from her hiding spot. 

“Hey, you!” She hurled the puck at the soldier, nailing him right between the eyes.

The puck was harmless on its own, but it served its purpose at causing a distraction.

“What the–” The soldier turned his gaze and rifle in her direction, which was more than enough time for Jesse to spin on his heel and put a bullet through the soldier’s head. He dropped like a stone and lay still.

“Jesse! Are you okay?” She rushed toward him, arms outstretched.

“Dammit, ‘Reeha, that was dangerous and reckless!” He caught her hug and held her close. “But also clever and brave. Thank you. Stick close, and let’s keep each other safe. And after this, I think it might be time to teach you how to handle a firearm, little lady.”

Fareeha held him tight and her trembling ceased. She was brave. She was clever. And she could be a hero, just like her mother.


	21. Laced Drink - Torbjorn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter. Other than a laced drink, I guess.

“Torbjorn Lindolm, in my bar? Why, it must be seven o’clock on a Friday night!”

“Come now, Erik. You’re just jealous that I have a consistent schedule!”

The barkeep only laughed. Trobjorn shrugged off his coat and took his usual place at the bar, with the barstool that had an extra rung specifically so Torbjorn could comfortably rest his feet.

“The usual, I assume?” Karl asked, reaching for a stein. 

“You know me so well,” Torbjorn frowned and looked around. “Where’s your daughter?”

“Ah, Linnea has a big test on Monday, so she’s taking the weekend to study,” the big man said, looking away and fussing with something behind the bar.

“Mighty kind of you. Tell her good luck and study hard from me!”

“So, how’s your family?” Karl asked.

“Oh, same as ever,” Torbjorn said. “Ingrid’s busy fussing over Eva’s new baby, though I have to admit he’s cute as a button. Wait, I think I have a picture!”

Torbjorn dug around in his pockets, trying to find holo-frame amid the odds and ends on his person at all times. Two men dressed in black suits sidled up to either side of him and took a seat. Torbjorn gave them both a quick, disapproving glance and tensed, sensing trouble.

“Plenty of other seats at the bar, boys,” he said carefully.

“Torbjorn Lindholm,” the man on his right stated.

“Never heard of him,” Torbjorn quipped.

“We have a proposition for you,” the man continued, ignoring Torbjorn’s interruption. “We know your history, and we’d like to employ you to produce certain products for us.”

“That’s comfortingly vague.”

“You’d be helping make the world a better place.”

“By doing what, might I ask?” Torbjorn asked sharply, turning to face the man.

“You would be directing a team that is currently hard at work designing a…device that can disable very specific electronic signatures on a large scale.”

Torbjorn squinted his one good eye, scrutinizing the man carefully.

“A bomb. You want me to work on a bomb.”

“I assure you, this device would bring no harm to any organic life form,” the man clarified.

“An omnic-killing bomb, specifically,” Torbjorn amended. “I don’t know if nobody’s told you, but the omnic war is long over. I don’t do that anymore.”

“But you do have very extensive knowledge of omnic internal workings. That knowledge is vital to our project. And your opinions on omnics aren’t exactly a secret.”

“Just because I hate omnics doesn’t mean I want to initiate another war!” Torbjorn blustered. “I’ve got enough blood on my hands, I don’t want to add anymore. Even if it’s synthetic.”

“War is happening all around you, whether you like it or not, Mr. Lindholm. The Siberian front is in shambles, London is in constant chaos, and you’re saying you won’t help? Are you trying to _protect_ omnics?”

“Don’t go putting words in my mouth, you suit!” Torbjorn snapped. “I’m staying out of it. No more weapons. Even if this bomb does what you say and only targets omnics, there’s still too much of a risk of innocent people getting hurt. I won’t get involved.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Lindholm,” the man said, and rose to his feet. “We’ll leave you to your drink.”

The two men stepped away and Karl slid Torbjorn’s drink in front of him.

“What a load of garbage,” Torbjorn grumbled and took a deep drink. “Can you believe that? Bothering me while I…”

He trailed off as the room listed violently to the right and he clung to the bar top to keep his balance. 

“W…what? Karl, what was in…”

Karl wasn’t looking at him. Karl’s attention was on the two suits.

“I did what you want. Now where’s Linnea? Where’s my daughter!”

Torbjorn fell sideways off the stool. His legs didn’t seem to work and the world was spinning violently.

“All in due time.”

The suits loomed over him as Torbjorn spiraled into darkness.

“First, we get what we came for.”


	22. Hallucinations - Mercy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter tagged for...hallucinations, I guess. Not much else.

“HELP!!!”

Angela snapped upright and leapt to her feet. Where was the emergency? Who was hurt? Who was…

The infirmary was quiet. All four of her patients were sound asleep. McCree dozed peacefully, surprisingly quiet for how loud he was while awake. Reinhardt was more noisy, breathing with deep, low breaths that came out in a large exhale, but at least he didn’t snore anymore after that upper sinus surgery. Hana was curled into a ball like a cat, clutching her pillow with the arm that wasn’t in a splint. Lena’s sleep was more fitful, laying in an ungainly sprawl and drooling out of one side of her mouth.

Tutting to herself, Angela made sure either of the girls hadn’t kinked their IV drips or occluded their catheters. She gently adjusted Lena’s splayed limbs to a more comfortable position, being particularly gentle with Lena’s broken legs, and eased another pillow under Hana’s head. 

There. Peaceful. But who had called for help? Angela poked her head out into the hall, but saw nothing in the dim, empty hallway. She returned to the infirmary with a frown. Strange…she was sure she heard someone…ah. 

A mug lay in shattered pieces on the floor, amid a pool of cold coffee. 

She must have nodded off on her desk and awoke when she knocked off her coffee cup. She groaned and cleaned the mess up before did something else foolish like cut herself on broken ceramic shards. 

She checked the time as she threw the last of the paper towels away. 4:39AM. Egad, how long did she sleep?! McCree’s next antibiotic injection was due at 4:45 and she’d missed Reinhardt’s cortisone injection by nine minutes! She hastily got to work, tending to her sleeping patients. 

A mission had gone very poorly yesterday; the team had walked into an ambush and only barely escaped with their lives. With Lucio in Numbani and Baptiste out on a mission in Canada, there was no one else help in the infirmary, leaving Angela on her own. Zenyatta also would have been a help, but he was in literal pieces after the ambush, and needed extensive repairs. Genji, bless him, had tried to help, but he only got in the way and was beside himself with worry over Zenyatta, so Angela had finally kicked him out to bother Torbjorn and Brigitte while they repaired the monk. That had been last night and Angela hadn’t had a chance to rest since.

Oh. Oh, wait. Angela frowned at the clock as she drew up Reinhardt’s cortisone shot. 4:41AM…No, she kicked Genji out two nights ago. Which meant it was…what? Tuesday? She’d been awake for over forty hours. 

She longed to curl up on one of the empty infirmary beds beside them and get some sleep, but there was still so much work to do. She gave Reinhardt his injection, which the big man didn’t even notice in his sleep, then got McCree his next dose of IV antibiotics. Then she made her rounds, checking on the status of each of her patients and adjusting their medications as needed.

“Too slow.”

Angela spun around from the monitor she’d been observing.

Nothing. Just the infirmary. Angela let out a deep breath and went back to the monitor. She collected a blood sample from Hana’s catheter and walked to the small lab.

“You could have saved me.”

Angela yelped and dropped the vial. Liao! She knew that voice! That was Liao! Oh God, his death weighed on her every day, if she’d only gotten to him faster, then maybe he would have survived the surgery…

“You weren’t there for me.”

A different voice this time, but one she knew even better. 

“If you’d come on the mission, you could have saved me.”

Ana…oh, Ana…Jack was forced to leave her on that mission, but if Angela had been there in the Valkyrie suit, then maybe…

What was she thinking? There was no use clinging to the past. She had patients to attend to. Angela picked the vial up off the ground, carefully examining it to make sure the seal was intact and that it hadn’t clotted. Hm. She only needed serum anyway, better spin it just in case. She opened the centrifuge and dropped the vial in with a balance, then started the machine.

“You abandoned me.”

The gruff voice growling in her voice sounded so familiar, so _real,_ that Angela shrieked and jumped away, but the sound drowned in the buzz of the centrifuge.

“J…Jack?”

Nothing.

Oh God. She was going crazy. No. No, she was just tired. She needed more coffee, that was all. Her hands shaking, she hustled to the coffee machine. The pot was cold, but she didn’t care at this point. She just needed the caffeine so she–

“You abandoned all of us.”

The coffee pot fell from her grip and shattered on the tile. 

Nothing. This was nothing. Just her imagination and memories and she’d been thinking about Strike Commander Morrison just the other day and–

“I’m dead because you left.”

Nononono, Jack, no, she left Overwatch because she wanted to dedicate more time to her humanitarian work, and Jack and Gabriel were always fighting all the time and Ana was gone, and just because she saw the writing on the wall didn’t mean that anything was her fault and–

“You killed me.”

There was nothing she could have done to stop the Switzerland bombing, even if she’d been there! She just would have been dead, too!

“Aren’t you the lucky one.”

The newest voice was a sarcastic sneer, and Angela could see Gabriel’s scowl reflected in the dark coffee seeping across the floor.

She fell to her knees and wept.


	23. Bleeding Out - McCree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Blood and injury, near-death experience

When McCree left his cheap motel to get pancakes, a gunfight was the last thing he expected. Still, he always did have the worst goddamn luck, so he wasn’t too terribly surprised when he ended up taking cover behind the bar in the hole-in-the-wall diner. Three men in the bar had turned hostile at the sight of him, though damned if he knew which of the many reasons someone would want him dead had them pissed off. He’d managed to draw the fire away from the civilians, and the door swung shut as the last of the customers and diner staff fled.

“Come on out, McCree! You can’t hide forever!” Sneered a familiar voice.

“Shit, Eddie, is that you?” McCree crouched behind the bar, Peacekeeper in one hand. 

“My name ain’t Eddie, McCree!” Eddie snarled back. “It’s Edward!”

“Fancy meeting you here, Eddie. When’d you start hunting bounties?” McCree inched toward the kitchen door. The counter was only plywood, and if Eddie’s brain caught up to his mouth, he’d realize he could shoot right through it. However, the kitchen had counters and appliances made of steel, which gave him plenty of solid cover until he could slip out the back door and run for it.

“Ain’t no bounty hunter. I’m a bonafide member of Talon!”

McCree groaned. 

“Really, Eddie? You went from Blackwatch right to Talon? You’re dumber than I thought!” He reached the edge of the counter and slid a flashbang off his belt. 

“Naw, I just know when to move to the winning team!”

“Your team ain’t won yet,” McCree said. 

“Looks that way to me. Overwatch’s been dead four years, now.”

“Justice’ll still be served even without Overwatch, Eddie. And Talon sure as hell ain’t gonna save your dumb ass from me.”

“I _told_ you, my name–”

Eddie fired a shot through the plywood, where McCree had been crouching twenty seconds ago.

“Ain’t!”

Another shot, one foot away.

“Eddie!”

The last shot put a new hole in his serape. Time to go.

“Sorry you feel that way, Eddie!” He hurled the flashbang over the counter behind him. “But I gotta go!”

The grenade went off, flooding the diner with a brilliant flash of light and the smell of gunpowder, and McCree rolled out of cover and into the kitchen. He ducked behind the island counter just in time for Eddie to start swearing up a storm.

“You son of a bitch!”

He started shooting wildly, the three men scrambling over each other to get to the kitchen. McCree wasn’t going to wait around for them to figure themselves out and bolted for the back door. 

**BANG BANG BA-_TWING_**

A shot ricocheted off the steel freezer door and buried itself deep into McCree’s thigh. McCree spat out a curse and clambered through the back exit, slamming the door behind him. Goddamn piece of shit bad luck. He looked around, but there wasn’t anything in the alley behind the diner apart from a dumpster. Damn. Nothing to block the door with. Well, he wasn’t going to be running anywhere with this gunshot, so if he took position behind the dumpster, he’d be able to–

McCree’s injured leg gave out and he fell to the ground, eating shit on the grimy asphalt. Goddamn, it wasn’t like this was the first time he’d been shot. What was–Oh.

_Oh._

That was a _lot_ of blood.

Bright red blood pulsed from his thigh in spurts that matched his heart rate. The motherfucker hit his femoral artery. Shit. That changed things. 

McCree kicked his leg up against the wall, laying on his back with his leg elevated above him. Gotta slow the bleeding, gotta put pressure on the wound. Shit, was it severed or just nicked? The sounds of a commotion came from behind the door.

And none of this meant a damn thing if those dumbasses burst through the door and filled him full of lead. His pant leg was soaked through with blood and his skin felt warm and wet as blood continued to pump out of him.

_Fuck._ After everything he’d survived, after Deadlock, Blackwatch, losing his fucking arm, he was going to die from a goddamn ricochet in the alley behind “Last Stop Burgers and Breakfast.”

Ironic.

A wave of dizziness washed over McCree, and his hands slipped. This wasn’t helping. He couldn’t get enough pressure to stop the bleeding. Did he have a tourniquet? Of course not, his first aid kit was back in the hotel. Could he make a tourniquet? He fumbled with the serape around his neck, but the world started spinning violently.

Goddamn. He really was going to die here. He just wanted some fucking pancakes and bacon. Well, if this was how he was gonna go…at least he made a difference. At least he saved those people in the diner, or the passengers on the hypertrain, or countless others over the years. Maybe it was even enough to atone for his past sins.

God, he wasn’t even upset about dying. What really burned him was that goddamn weasel _Eddie_ was who got him in the end. What a joke.

Where was Eddie, anyway? He should have come through the back door to put McCree out of his misery by now. McCree’s strength was rapidly fading, and he couldn’t even try to put pressure on his wound anymore. Hell, he couldn’t even lift his arms. For a moment, he thought he heard shotgun rounds from the diner, but he could have sworn that the Talon goons were carrying handguns.

The back door finally opened. The last thing McCree saw was a black and silver boot, surrounded by wisps of black smoke.

As he sank into unconsciousness, a voice followed him down, an impossible voice, a ghost from the past, and surely a hallucination brought on by his eminent death.

“Guess I have to save your ass once again, ingrate.”

Then there was only darkness.


	24. Secret Injury - Brigitte

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags for this chapter: Injury, some goddamn fluff

“You’ve made a mess of yourself this time, Reinhardt.”

“You say that every time! It’s not as bad as it looks!”

“I’m literally pulling your armor off of you with a crowbar!”

“That just means the armor did its job!” 

Reinhardt let out a roar of a laugh. They’d played this scenario out dozens of times before, Reinhardt brushing off his injuries while Brigitte scolded him and patched him up. The routine was comforting in its familiarity, but today Brigitte gritted her teeth instead of continuing their usual banter. Reinhardt didn’t notice, and his boisterous laughter continued to ring off the walls. 

She gave his armor a good jerk with the crowbar, and a series of sharp pains shot through the right side of her chest. 

“Ah, Brigitte,” Reinhardt said as his laughter finally died down. “What would I do without you?”

“Stay stuck in your armor, for one,” she snapped, and gave the breastplate a rap with the crowbar for emphasis. The quick movement set off another sharp pain and Brigitte bit her lip to stop from gasping. She was fine. Reinhardt was the one who needed attention.

“Hah! That just means that I would never stop crusading!”

“And catch your death for it!”

“Impossible! My armor would protect me!” 

Brigitte hooked the crowbar under the broken latch and pushed. The metal finally started to bend, and Brigitte used her weight to lean on the crowbar. The metal groaned, then the latched snapped abruptly and she fell to the ground.

She gave sharp gasp as her chest exploded with agony and the breath was knocked out of her. 

She was fine. 

“Wonderful! I knew you could do it!”

She was fine. 

Brigitte climbed to her feet and helped Reinhart remove the heavy breastplate. Her chest felt tight, and she couldn’t seem to breathe. 

She was _fine_.

“Ahhhhh…” Reinhardt sighed and rolled his shoulders as the last of the power armor fell away. 

It needed extensive repairs, and Brigitte would start on it right after she finished patching up Reinhardt. She gave him a look over, examining the wide bruises that crossed his broad form, and told herself that she was fine, dammit, and she needed to take care of Reinhardt. He pushed himself so hard, much harder than a man of his age should, and he needed help more than she did. She managed a few quick gasps through the chest pain, and sternly _demanded_ her body obey her and get its act together.

“Thank you, Brigitte. What do you say to dinner before we get to work, hm?”

Brigitte didn’t see Reinhardt’s massive hand swing down to give her a friendly slap on the back, and the blow took her completely by surprise. She cried out as a wave of agony rolled through her and she dropped to the floor.

“Brigitte?”

She tried to get up, but couldn’t move her limbs and lay stunned on her front. Her head swam and her chest burned. She couldn’t breathe! 

“Brigitte!!!”

She weakly gasped, lungs screaming for air that was just out of reach. Distantly, she felt Reinhardt gently lift her into his arms, shouting her name, and his frightened face was the last thing she saw.

* * *

Blunt force trauma, is what they told her after the fact. Along with other scary terms like collapsed lung, airway rupture, and hemothorax. They called her lucky. She only felt guilty.

At the end of it, she sat upright in her hospital bed, staring at her hands and fiddling with the hospital identification tag around her wrist. It was better than looking at Reinhardt’s tear-stained face.

“Brigitte,” Reinhardt broke the silence.

She didn’t answer. 

“Brigitte, please.”

The pain in his voice broke her heart and tears welled in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“No, no…” Reinhardt gently took her hand and she finally met his gaze. His blue eyes sparkled with tears, and her guilt intensified, sitting like a ball of lead in her gut. 

“I’m…I’m supposed to take care of you. Not…”

“And you do!” Reinhardt said, giving her hand a soft squeeze. “You are the best squire any knight could ask for! But, please…please, promise me you will never put your safety above my own. If you are injured, I want to know. You take care of me. But let me take care of you, too.”

A single tear trailed down her cheek before she buried her face into his chest and wept.

“I love you like the daughter I never had,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. He pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her head. “Just don’t tell Torbjorn, hm? I think he’d be jealous.”

He spoke the last sentence in such a playful, conspiratorial whisper that Brigitte couldn’t help but laugh.

“No telling Papa that he has to share custody with you. Got it. I think Mama already knows, though.”

“Ah, Ingrid has always been more perceptive than either of us. I think she’s accepted the fact. …And to my other request?”

Brigitte pulled away and wiped her eyes.

“I promise. I won’t hide when I’m hurt. Thank you, Reinhardt.”

“You are most welcome, my squire.”


	25. Humiliation - Mei

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tagged for Asshole Journalists.

“Ten minutes, Ms. Zhou.”

“Thank you!”

No matter how many times Mei went on television, she always got pre-camera jitters. She looked through her notes one more time, even though she had them memorized, more out of habit than anything else.

“Mei-Ling Zhou, it’s an honor,” A woman with bleach-blonde hair and bright red lipstick wrapped around sparkling white teeth beamed down at her. “Alexa Steele. I’ll be conducting your interview today.”

“Oh! Thank you! It’s good to meet you!” Mei shook her hand and Alexis took a seat across from her.

“I’m so glad to have you on the show! The work you’ve done? The incredible challenges you’ve overcome? Not to mention your extensive contributions to climatology and ecological efforts. Once we’re done with the commercial break, I’ll introduce you and we’ll be off. Our segment is fifteen minutes long, when we get to three minutes, the stagehand will turn the red light on.”

“Okay. Right,” Mei shuffled her notes around and flushed. If Mrs. Steele was so interested in her work, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. “I’d like to focus on my research findings…”

“Right, right,” Alexis said around her brilliant smile. “Of course. I’ll meet you out on stage!”

Mei looked through her notes one more time, then put them away in her bag, picked up the hand-held holoprojector, and let the stagehand escort her out on stage. The studio was brightly lit, and once her eyes adjusted, she looked over the live studio audience behind the camera. That was…a lot more people than she expected. That was fine. This was fine. It was less than most of the university lecture halls she’d taught in. This was no different from any other lecture or talk she’d given.

Except this was her first televised interview since she left EcoPoint: Antarctica.

Oh boy.

“And we are live in three…two…one!”

The show’s jingle played and Alexa beamed at the camera. 

“Welcome back to Newslight Today, the world’s leading program for all the hottest topics and news. Today I have with me a very special guest, scientist Mei-Ling Zhao!”

Mei smiled and waved as the audience applauded.

“Thank you!”

“Ms. Zhao is well known for her extensive work in climatology and environmental sciences, and is the inventor of the famous C.L.E.A.R. atmospheric monitoring system. In 2065, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contributions to-”

Alexa carried on with Mei’s introduction, and Mei started to relax. She was smart, talented, and capable. All she wanted was to share her research to the world and bring awareness to the very dangerous issues she was studying.

“Even more recently, Mei made headlines when she survived a trek across the Antarctic wastelands to civilization, after the disgraced Overwatch abandoned her research station and left her and her team of scientists to die.”

Wait, what? Mei’s smile faded.

“We’re all familiar with the fall of Overwatch, but we didn’t know how many other people the corrupt organization was hurting behind the scenes.”

That…that wasn’t right, but the lights were so bright and the audience was so big, and this wasn’t what she wanted to talk about at all, and it wasn’t _true_, but Mei didn’t know what to say. Alexa wasn’t giving her much of an opportunity to talk, either, controlling the interview with an iron grip.

“So, tell me Mei, the hot question on everyone’s mind is what exactly did you do at Ecopoint: Antarctica?”

Finally, a chance to speak, and they were back on track to talk about her work.

“My research into climatology has been very insightful, and–”

“Oh, no,” Alexa interrupted. “I meant after the accident. How did you survive?”

“Oh…I…” This wasn’t how Mei thought this would go at all, and she shifted in her seat uncomfortably. She couldn’t reveal Winston’s Recall, that would reveal the new Overwatch and get them all in serious trouble! But could she lie on live television, in front of all these people?

“A…weather anomaly pinged the system, which is what finally triggered the wake cycle. Once I learned how much time had passed, I–”

“Wait, you survived because of a weather anomaly?” Alexa asked, keeping her cheerful white smile, but her eyes bore holes in Mei. It was all Mei could do not to shrink back under that gaze.

“…Yes…” No, it was Winston’s transmission, but she couldn’t _say_ that.

“So, despite your qualifications and all the qualifications of your team members, you survived because of a fluke.”

“W-Well…no, I was able to invent the ectothermic blaster…”

“A weapon,” Alexa noted, looking down her nose at Mei. “Was this commissioned by the corrupt Overwatch? Maybe even Blackwatch?”

“What? No! No, I just needed something to…” She couldn’t talk about repairing the radio antenna, either, not if she wanted to keep Winston’s secret safe. “…to…help cross any obstacles…”

“So you came out of cryostasis and built a weapon. Why couldn’t you save your teammates?”

“I…” Mei stared at her, mouth agape. “I couldn’t. They…they were already gone by the time I woke up.”

“They were?” Alexa asked shrewdly. “You checked on them right away?”

“Well, I actually didn’t realize they hadn’t woken up until after I’d gotten ready for the morning and realized no one had come to get their coffee…”

“Are you telling me that you didn’t even _notice?_”

Mei shrank back as Alexa continued.

“You failed to verify the status of your teammates when you woke up, you only woke up at all because of a fluke, and you only barely managed to escape. You didn’t survive because you are smart, you survived because you are lucky.”

Tears filled Mei’s eyes. Was it true? Was she only lucky that she’d made it this far? 

Alexa sniffed. “What were you even _doing_ down there?”

“I…was making the world a better place,” Mei said softly, and as she spoke the words aloud, she realized they were true.

“Excuse me?”

“I was making the world better!” Mei sat up straighter and activated the hologram projector in her hand. Graphs, diagrams, and charts of her research sprung to life around the studio. “And I’m going to tell you how!”

Bowling past Alexa’s protests, she launched into her presentation on her research, emboldened with the knowledge that she was right. Her work would save millions of lives, and no one, especially one slanderous reporter, would stop her!


	26. Abandoned - Bastion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tagged for cute and birds. I'm sorry. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be too mean to Bastion.

“Tweetwee, Trrrrrrrill, Tsweee!”

Birdsong was a familiar sound in the Black Forest, but recently, Ganymede had been particularly invested in adding his voice to the chorus amid the trees. The old Bastion unit didn’t mind. It quite enjoyed the jaunty tunes, and often marveled at how many sounds its little friend could make. Whistles, tweets, trills, and chirps, far more broad and diverse than its own limited synthetic boops and beeps. So if Ganymede wanted to sing more heartily this spring, that was just fine.

“Tweetwee, trill, tsweee!”

Ganymede’s tiny feet scrabbled atop the steel casing of Bastion’s head, and the little bird launched himself into the air and alighted on a tree branch. He cocked his head, as if listening, and sang his song again. He hopped to another branch, sang the song once more, then took off into the trees.

Bastion lost sight of him almost immediately. His visual processors were limited, designed to separate friend from foe on the battlefield and not at all optimized for birdwatching. Still, Ganymede often wandered off, mostly to forage for food or water before returning, so Bastion continued on its way. 

It didn’t know where it was going. After discovering the battlefield and rejecting its orders to attack a city twenty years after the war ended, Bastion didn’t have any directives to follow. It was a soldier without orders, free to do as it wanted, but something in its core programing still drove it search for…something. It didn’t know quite what. Perhaps a suitable location to defend. But what was a suitable location? Bastion didn’t know, so it kept wandering, exploring the forest one step at a time.

Ganymede didn’t return by nightfall. Ganymede always returned by sunset. At night, there was danger. Foxes, owls, wildcats, and weasels were all animals Bastion had seen in the forest, and all would be happy to make a meal out of the little bird. He’d seen the predators hunting before, but none were willing to risk attacking a single Eichenwalde Cardinal that slept on the shoulder of a strange creature that smelled of steel and oil. With Bastion, Ganymede was safe.

So where was he?

Worried that Ganymede would get lost in the dark, Bastion stopped for the night in a clearing and waited. And waited.

_And waited._

It sat in the clearing, sometimes moving from one end of the small meadow to the other. Bastion fiddled with a fallen yellow feather caught in its shoulder joint. It added a new flower to the nest on its shoulder, and waited for Ganymede’s return.

The sun rose three days later, and Bastion’s heart finally broke. 

What if he was never coming back? Why did he leave? Was he safe? Should Bastion go look for him or wait for him to come back? Was he lost? Was he hurt? Was he…

“Tweetwee, trrrill, tswee!”

Bastion’s head snapped up as the familiar call rang through the usual morning birdsong.

“Tweetwee, trill, tswee!”

A flash of yellow darted through the trees to the right.

“Tsweeeeet, tsweetswee!”

Another yellow flash to the left. Bastion spun around, trying to follow the quick movements.

“Tswee, tweetwit!”

Ganymede flitted out of the trees, circling once above Bastion before landing on its outstretched finger. Bastion was overjoyed, vocalizing its glee in the simple beeping sublanguage it knew.

“Tswee!”

A second yellow bird darted out of the trees, circling a few times before landing on a branch nearby. The new bird looked similar to Ganymede, the same bright yellow, though without the orange crest, and the markings on the wings were more brown than yellow. It twittered anxiously and hopped along the branch. 

Ganymede fluttered to Bastion’s shoulder and fiddled with the nest before he flew to the branch and preened the new bird comfortingly. He twittered to the newcomer, then flew back to Bastion, perching on his head and calling out again. The new bird fussed a bit more, then hesitantly flew to land beside Ganymede. 

Was this…had Ganymede found a mate? Bastion had seen birds in pairs before. Was this where its friend had been? The two birds preened each other for a moment more, then the new little female fluttered to the nest and got comfortable. 

Bastion hummed its relief and delight. Even with all the worry, it was grateful for their little family, bigger now than ever before.


	27. Ransom - Sombra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter.

Sombra knew better than to trust anyone. Trust was a tool, a way to manipulate people who trusted her, and she knew better than to be on the other side of that spectrum. Or so she thought. Despite her precautions, she still never expected an attack from her fellow gang members. These were people she’d grown up with, spent the last five years of her life living and working alongside them! She’d been a part of Los Muertos ever since she was fourteen!

Dammit. Even if she hadn’t meant to, she’d trusted them.

They’d caught her by surprise. Three on one, they’d overpowered her and dragged her into a back room, where they handcuffed her to a chair. They stood around her and tried to look intimidating, body paint glowing faintly in the dim light.

But knowledge was power, and Sombra knew them too well to be intimidated. Her own body paint glowed alongside theirs.

“What the hell, Rikki?” She shouted. “And you’re in this too, Maria? Miguel? Juan? Carlos is going to have your heads when I tell him about this!”

“You can cut the act, Olivia,” Rikki said, folding his thick arms. “We know your loyalties haven’t been with Los Muertos for months. Carlos won’t care what we do if you’ve been backing out of the gang.”

Okay, that was technically true. Sombra was exploring new avenues of information, and Los Muertos was too small for her plans. She needed to go global. There was no way Rikki could have known that, though.

“What the hell are you talking about?” She snapped.

“The new mods?” He nodded toward the still-healing implants in her skull.

“Are cosmetic, you dope!” She lied. “And they look badass!”

That part wasn’t a lie. She was very happy with how the new cybernetics looked. Her modder had even made them purple.

“What about the ones in your spine? Are those cosmetic when no one sees them?”

“You been peeping on me, you creep?” Sombra snarled. 

Rikki shrugged. “I’m just saying that’s a lot of hardware just for the aesthetic. God knows you’re dramatic, Olivia, but I know enough about implants to know damn well those aren’t just for show.”

“Get to the point, Rikki. What do you want?” She pulled on the handcuffs. They were the new fancy ones, electromagnetic and hardlight, instead of just steel locks. Unbreakable, they said.

“We know who you’re really working for,” Maria stepped forward, hands on her hips. “We know you’ve been selling information behind our backs.”

Well, yeah. But she’d been doing that from day one.

“We know who you are,” Maria continued. “We know who you really work for. We know you’re an informant for the best hacking organization in the world. And we’re going to hold you for ransom until Sombra pays up.”

Sombra stared at them.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me.”

“Don’t play dumb,” Rikki said. “You’re the best hacker in Los Muertos. In all of Dorado!”

In the world, Sombra silently corrected.

“Kinda funny, don’t you think? That you get all these cyber upgrades right as this new Sombra starts becoming big? I think Sombra paid for your implants in exchange for information on Los Muertos!”

He was almost right, she had to admit. Sombra _did_ pay for her own implants. They were off the mark, but they were close.

Too close.

“You all think this?” Sombra sked.

They nodded with murmured words of assent.

“Does anyone else know this?”

“We haven’t told anyone,” Juan said. “We’re gonna get the credit for extorting money out of Sombra ourselves.”

“That’s all I needed to know.” Sombra curled a finger, and her implants lit up, running from her skull, down her spine, to her fingertips, and she hacked the electromag handcuffs with a thought. They fell open and Sombra grinned. 

“Adios!” She waved her fingers and activated her new cloaking, trying it in action for the first time.

“What the–” Rikki lunged forward, but Sombra had already darted out of the way, skittering behind the group. They looked around, dumbfounded, but couldn’t see her. 

Good to know that worked. It was a shame, really. Rikki wasn’t always the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’d guessed close enough to the mark that someone smarter than him could take that information and make the connection that Olivia and the new Sombra on the scene were one and the same.

And information was power. Power that could be used against her. She slipped forward and yanked the submachine gun from off Maria’s belt. Three quick bursts of fire, and it was all over. She kept her Cloaking up and left the hideout.

Her secret was still safe, but maybe this was a sign that it was time to leave Los Muertos. Her ambitions had outgrown what the gang could offer her.

It was time to leave Olivia Colomar behind for good.


	28. Beaten - Reaper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tagged for Brooding Edge Lord being Sad

As far as location went, Cairo wasn’t the worst place to stay. It reminded him of Los Angeles, to be honest, with the hot, arid weather, the palm trees, and the crowded, bustling streets. They weren’t on the coast, which was a shame, but it wasn’t like Reaper could enjoy the beach anymore anyway.

He wasn’t allowed to enjoy anything anymore.

The fight with Jack an Ana left Reaper’s head spinning. He needed to think, needed to figure out how this was going to affect his long term plans. Jack and Ana, reunited again.

United against him.

“Reaper!”

Oh God. 

“Reaper, the base! Did you hear, the base is under attack! I thought Talon sent you here to protect me!” Hakim stumbled as he ran down the corridor, his plump face flushed with exertion. 

Reaper briefly considered wraithing away. Literally dissolving his physical form into a nanite swarm seemed like less work than dealing with Hakim right now, especially in his current mindset, but he knew that avoiding Hakim now meant dealing with him later, which was just as bad. He ducked his cowl low. His mask was still outside where Ana had removed it.

Ana. Ana Amari, alive after all these years. How many times had he fought with Jack, blaming him for her death? If he’d only have known…

“Reaper! What are we going to do?”

Fucking Hakim.

“The base isn’t under attack,” Reaper growled. 

“But the alarms!”

“The problem has been dealt with,” Reaper snarled in his direction, and Hakim blanched at the sight of his exposed face. 

“O…oh. Y-yes. Yes, of…of course. I’ll…I’ll just…I, uh…I’ll…”

Reaper shoved past him and left him sputtering in the hallway. He could imagine what Hakim had seen, dark flesh, rotting and healing as his nanites decayed and repaired his walking corpse all at once. He made it to the shitty guest room Hakim gave him without further interruptions and locked the door.

What a mess. He slid off his gauntlets shrugged out of his overcoat, and grimaced as his side ached. Probably a broken rib, though whether it was from Jack beating the shit out of him or Ana throwing him off the roof, he couldn’t say. He sat down on the side of the shitty cot and ran his fingers through his greying hair.

Talon sent him here to protect Hakim and catch or kill whoever was harassing him, a vigilante known as the Shrike. Reaper knew Jack was in the area, and was sure if he set a trap for the Shrike, Jack would fall into it as well. It had worked perfectly, he just didn’t expect the Shrike to be Ana, a friend long dead.

The fight replayed through his head. He’d carefully aimed to shoot Jack in the ass and not in the head, making sure he was convincingly deadly while ensuring Jack survived the attack. That, as expected, lured out the Shrike, but then she removed her mask, showed herself to be his long lost friend, back from the grave. That made all three of the old trio returned from the dead, some more than others. Knowing the Shrike was Ana meant there was no way Reaper could follow through with his trap, so he put on a token fight, tussled with Jack, let Ana see him for the monster he’d become, and fled.

He let his mind dwell on the worst parts. Jack, so full of rage, beating Reaper with his bare fists, not giving a damn about guns or logic as he took out his fury on the lover that betrayed him. Ana, and the look of horror on her face when she saw what her old friend had become. He’d let her see. He wanted her to see. He wanted them to distance themselves from him, but he knew in his heart that would never happen.

Ana and Jack, together again. That changed things. That changed things a lot. Jack had been running his Soldier: 76 vigilante gig for a few years, pursuing his own strain of vengeance, and he’d mostly ended up staying out of Reaper’s way. But now he had Ana, and Ana was smarter than to follow Jack’s blind fury. She’d be able to channel him, and get him working toward a real goal. And now that they both knew who he was, he expected they’d get in his way more often.

That was…not good. He was a tool of Talon, and had climbed the ranks to become a commander. Akande was planning on breaking out of prison soon, and Reaper expected Akande to ask him to join him for the next Talon Council meeting. Finally. After years of subterfuge and undercover work, he would finally see with his own eyes every ranking leader of Talon. And once he’d identified them, he could start taking Talon down from within.

But with Jack and Ana underfoot, everything was at risk. How many times could Reaper let them escape before Akande became suspicious? How long before his loyalty was challenged and he was ordered to kill them? Or worse, someone else was ordered to kill them without his knowledge? Would he just find a report one day stating that Widowmaker had successfully eliminated his two best friends without his knowledge? How could he protect them without compromising his goals?

Telling them was out of the question. It would compromise the cover he’d spent so long building, and they wouldn’t believe him anyway. He’d done too many terrible things to get Talon to trust him. Unforgivable things. He wasn’t just pretending to be a monster, he’d become one. He just hoped it would be worth it.

But how far was he willing to go? He thought there was nothing he wouldn’t do to achieve his goal of destroying Talon, but if it came to killing Ana and Jack? Could he do it? Was it worth failure if he couldn’t?

Reaper buried his face in his hands and felt the weariness of years settle on his shoulders.

In the end, he was still Gabriel Reyes, just another old soldier.


	29. Numb - Widowmaker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No particular tags for this chapter.

The cemetery was empty of visitors, though Widowmaker supposed most people didn’t choose to spend Christmas morning with the dead. It was exceptionally gloomy, as far as Christmases go, even without the graveyard. The sky was dark with grey stormclouds and snow fell all about her. It wasn’t the bright, fat clumps of snow that made for excellent snowballs, but kind of snow that fell in sharp, tiny flakes, like breathing in diamond dust that froze in the lungs.

Not that she could tell anymore. The snow melted on the crimson rose in her hand faster than on her skin. She was numb. Numb to the cold, numb to the pain, numb all the way down to her soul.

She stood in front of the headstone, rubbing the stem of the rose between her fingers.

Gerard Lacroix.

She knew, logically, who he was. Her creation had not been kept secret from her. She was the best assassin in all of Talon, and the first widow she ever made was herself, when she took her husband’s life.

She couldn’t really remember it. She vaguely remembered a white hotel room and a spray of scarlet blood up the wall. She remembered the lights in her eyes and needles in her veins. Her first clear memory wasn’t until the moment she was handed her rifle and her handler told her that killing was her only purpose in life, and as a killer, she was the best. The kill was the only thing that mattered, the only time that her heart felt a flicker of emotion was in the thrill of a successful hit. She was numb to everything else.

Then why was she here? Why did she wake up at the crack of dawn to come to this place? Why did she purchase a rose for a dead man she didn’t remember?

She set the rose down upon his grave. Crimson petals against the snow, like blood in a white hotel room.

A single tear ran down her pale blue cheek.

Maybe it was easier to be numb.


	30. Recovery - Ana

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No tags for this chapter

The first time Ana lied about having amnesia, she wondered why she did it. Fear of being recognized, maybe. Many people here knew the name Ana Amari, though none had yet recognized her with her bandaged face.

Or perhaps Ana just didn’t want to talk about what happened. It was easier to say she didn’t remember.

Ana sat in her hospital bed, staring at her hands. 

Amelie Lacroix was alive. Amelie killed Gerard, killed half Ana’s squad, and almost killed Ana. It sounded insane. Just six months ago, Ana attended Amelie’s performance of La Bayadere. What would the others say? Gabriel had been devastated by Gerard’s death, and Jack took it almost as hard. They would be crushed to learn that Amelie was so much worse than missing. Doubtless, Jack would blame himself and lock himself away to brood. Gabriel would lash out, and then go find something to take his anger out on. And as for herself…

Ana failed to take the shot. She hesitated. She was so shocked by the twisted face of Amelie looking back at her, that she let the brainwashed sniper shoot her in the eye. But could she have pulled the trigger on sweet Amelie? After all the lives she’d taken, would one more be any different, even if she wore the face of a friend?

What kind of person would she be, if one life meant nothing?

With that thought, a weight fell about her shoulders. 

No more. No more killing. No more murder. No more lost friends. She couldn’t do it anymore. The news was already reporting that she was dead. Maybe it was best she’d stay that way.

Maybe with her out of the way, Jack and Gabriel would finally be forced to talk to each other and work out their differences. They relied on her too much to be the mediator between them, her death would bring them closer together. And Fareeha…

Her heart clenched.

Fareeha. Her angel. Was it worth never seeing her daughter again? But if Amelie could be kidnapped and brainwashed from her own home, then what did that mean for Fareeha? If Ana returned, Fareeha would be in danger. But if Ana died, then Fareeha would go live with her father in Toronto. Sam was as far away from danger as he could get.

Ana clenched her fists. That settled it. She was done with Overwatch, with fighting, with killing. She was done with watching friends die. She was done with all of it.

No more.


	31. Embrace - Zenyatta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tagged for anti-omnic assholes.

“Stupid bot!”

The next punch drove Service Drone Serial Designation Z3-1N-77A5 to his knees. The human kicked him in the side, then stomped on his back.

“How does it feel, huh? You like that? You like feeling weak?”

Z3-1N-77A5 tried to hold firm as the human beat him.

“How do you think my sister felt? You fucking omnics ruined my family! You ruined my life!”

Z3-1N-77A5 was only a service drone. He didn’t fight in the Omnic Crisis. He wasn’t even built until ten years after the Crisis ended. He followed his programming. He went to a factory every day and performed repetitive, menial tasks for nineteen hours, then went to his charging dock where he downloaded updates to his software and recharged. Then, exactly five hours and twenty-six minutes later, he went to work again. He never hurt anyone. This human was beyond listening to reason, however, and he endured the abuse. Maybe if the human got bored, he would leave and let Z3-1N-77A5 get back to his day. He needed to get to the factory. His shift started in twenty minutes.

“Hey, man. What are you doing?”

Z3-1N-77A5 looked up hopefully. A new human approached.

“You’ll never kill it like that. Try this.”

His heart sank as the new human handed a baseball bat to his assailant.

“Oh, hey. Thanks, man,” His attacker snickered.

“Yeah, just hurry it up. I got somewhere to be at midnight.”

The first blow knocked Z3-1N-77A5 off his knees and laid him flat. The next put a solid dent in his thoracic chassis. The next blow hit him right in the spinal wiring, and set off his internal alarms. He feebly tried to hold his hands up to defend himself. A solid swing of the bat broke one of his hands clean off, and another snapped his elbow joint, leaving his arm to dangle uselessly. With no other way to defend himself, he weakly curled up and tried to wait out the attack.

This wasn’t fair. Why should he not be allowed to defend himself? Why couldn’t he make a stand? Why should he have to lay down and let himself be beaten to scrap?

It wasn’t _right._

He was just as alive as any human.

Internal alarms blared error messages through his CPU. He clenched his remaining fist. The bat came down on his head and his circuits went dark.

***

There was light in the distance. Not a physical light, but a signal. A pulse of energy like light at the end of a tunnel, calling out in low frequency code to anyone willing to listen. Z3-1N-77A5 reached out to it and made contact. The light embraced him, filled his circuits, and rejuvenated his battery. It was like activating for the first time, but so much better.

***

Z3-1N-77A5 rebooted in time to see the two men walking away. The errors still flashed through his code, alerting him to the damage he had sustained, but his circuitry was miraculously intact. He waited until their footsteps faded, then slowly crawled to his feet. He ran a quick diagnostic scan on himself, and decided that things could have been much worse. He limped back the way he came.

The nagging programming that urged him to follow his pre-set routine was gone. He was certainly not going in to work today. Or ever again, for that matter.

Y4-2T-31A4 told him about a repair bot that went off the grid and repaired damaged bots, even if they didn’t belong to the factory. He would go there. After that, he would go East.

The feeling of the light, the signal, the embrace still filled him. It almost felt like a dream, except for two very real intrusions upon his memory banks. The first was a set of GPS coordinates, which looked to be in Nepal. The second was a single word, repeated in binary, ingrained amid the coordinates.

01001001 01010010 01001001 01010011.

IRIS.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE DID IT! All 31 chapters of Whumptober completed on time! I want to express my undying gratitude to everyone who commented and cheered be on. It was you that helped me keep up the motivation to continue this. Thank you so much to all of you for reading, and feel free to check out my other works!
> 
> Happy Halloween!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments are always encouraged and fill me with warm fuzzies.
> 
> You can hit me up at Tumblr at [@dabbledrabbleprose](http://dabbledrabbleprose.tumblr.com) and [@SadinaSaphrite,](http://sadinasaphrite.tumblr.com) and on Twitter as [@SadinaSaphrite.](https://twitter.com/SadinaSaphrite)


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